Problems loading on large filesystems

[Scott Hadfield <shadfiel cs sfu ca>]

Hi,
 I'm working on getting linux set up for a large number of students at my
university. We're running Redhat 7.1 with Midnight Commander 4.5.51. We're
now starting to do some testing and we're having some trouble working out
a few issues. Our main issue right now is as follows:
 Every student's home folder is located on one 150GB fs that's mounted on
each workstation. Gnome initially boots up fine, with midnight commander
running (it loads the desktop icons). When I try to open mc on the home
folder it takes 23 minutes to load. It appears as if mc is first trying to
index the entire fs before it is able to load. Any help would be much
appreciated,

Thanks,
Scott