Mavericks unable to view contents of AFP shares

I have one test machine in a digital production environment I manage that first exhibited this issue when I installed Mavericks. I have since reproduced the issue on personal Mavericks systems as well as other Mavericks systems at other client locations whom I manage. The basic issue is, the Finder is pretty easily taxed to the point where it cannot display folder contents without a lag. It is consistently reproduceable at a particular client's, who has a fiber-connected RAID shared from an Intel Xserve running OS X 10.5.8., but I have seen incarnations of this basic problem on other systems, at other sites, both with other network shares/storage, as well as directly connected external drives and even on a host systems' own hard drive. In all cases, the issue only exhibits in a Mavericks Finder, and other versions of Mac OS do not have a problem. When it occurs, you see a spinner in the Finder window corner that indicates it is fetching the contents of the directory, and ostensibly, the larger the size or folder depth of the contents, the longer the wait. I first noticed the issue with OS X 10.9, and it has persisted unchanged thourhg OS X 10.9.1.

Here's a more literal/specific description, all shares are accessed via AFP:

It first came to my attention when we were trying to copy some files to a machine with a USB 3.0 card, we were under the gun for time and intended to copy the files from our RAID to a machine that would then be able to copy files to an external drive the fastest. Said USB card was only supported/recognized by OS 10.9. When we went to the desired file location on our RAID, booted to a Mavericks OS, a certain folder (about 7 folders deep, on a 4TB RAID, viewing several Adobe CS files, some as large as 2GB's each) appeared empty. That same folder on another machine (OS 10.6.8) displayed the contents fine. I moved our Mavericks-installed hard drive to multiple Mac Pros, each one exhibiting the porblem only when booted to 10.9. Eventually I noticed the previously mentioned spinner in the Mavericks Finder when the files seemed to be missing, everntually discovering that I could leave the window open, and the contents would display after about 10 minutes.

I have researched and tried the following (a general Google/Bing search on "Slow Mavericks Finder" will reiterate these same suggestions), all have not helped the issue for any machine in my reach:

• Running these line commands:

sudo vi /etc/auto_master

In this file comment out /net with # (#/net .....)

sudo automount -vc

• Disabling/enabling scrollbar display

• Removing all "Tags" from the sidebar

On thing tried that did work, was booting the Mavericks system in Safe Mode, which is not usable for all the other things it disables, but it displays the same problem shares/files fine when booted in this mode.

My personal suspicion is that whatever was changed in the Finder in order to facilitate/support the new tagging system, lies at the root of these woes, but so far I have found no way to completely disable the tagging feature. I can only remove Tags from the Finder sidebar via Finder > Preferences, but the issue remains either way.

Can anyone advise?