Problem With Number Of Users Limitation When Sharing A Folder Peer-to-Peer

I have a problem when more than about ten users access a shared folder on a
Win Xp Pro SP1 machine on a peer-to-peer network.

There are 30 Win 9x clients on the network and when the number of client
connections to the share gets to what I think is about 10 the remaining
clients get these error messages when they try to access the share:

"<share-name> is not accessible. No more connections can be made to this
remote computer at this time because there are already as many connections
as the computer can accept"

or

"\\<computer-name> is not accessible. The request is not accepted by the
network. Try again later."

The Win XP Pro SP1 machine containing the share has a 2.8GHz Hyper Threading
P4 with 512MB of 400MHz DDR RAM and has been configured as a server by
setting System Properties-Advanced-Peformance-Settings-Advanced-Processor
Sceduling to "Background Services" and by setting System
Properties-Advanced-Peformance-Settings-Advanced-Memory Usage to "System
Cache".

I have tried using both Simple File Sharing and Permissions but the result
is still the same. In the Computer Management snap-in I have changed the
User Limit from "Maximum Allowed" to 40 but this also has no effect. RAM and
CPU usage doesn't appear to be the cause of the problem.

The joke is that the Windows Me machine that previously acted as a file
server handled all this with no problems!

Could anyone tell me:

1. How to overcome the problem.
2. How to accurately monitor the number of client connections to the share -
I don't think the figure shown in Computer Management - Shared Folders -
Shares - # Client Connections is accurate.

I work in the IT team of a computer centre for the disabled
(www.ctec.org.uk) and this problem is severely affecting our ability to help
our clients.
Many thanks,
Malcolm

XP only allows 10 concurrent connections, so changing the folder limit wont help
you need to upgrade to a server.



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