Thanks for your reply. Yeah, I have a directory on my external hard drive that I've added to my server as a real folder. The root directory contains about 4,000 individual files and something like 7,000 subdirectories. When I click on the folder from within HFS the browser shows that it's loading something and when I check HFS the status indicates it's, "thinking." If I wait long enough, the browser ends up freezing. After consuming something like 100 megabytes of RAM, the connection is dropped. Other times, HFS becomes unresponsive. I've gotten it to list a couple times, but I can't even get it to do it at all at the moment. I'm accessing the server from my local machine. The only thing I can figure is it's just overwhelmed with the number of files and folders. But, it seems like if I can access it from windows explorer at a reasonable speed the server should be able to mimic that, but I don't really understand enough about how it works.
I just added the folder as a virtual folder instead and the result seems to be the same. I tried disabling the option you suggested and toggled some of the others to no avail. It says it added something like 122,000 files. It seems to freeze HFS on access. Maybe it's just too many files at once, but it seems like you could index the folder somehow or get it to list faster. Windows explorer seems to be able to access it within 15-20 seconds.
Thanks for your help.