I'm writing a program which views drives over a WAN but I'm encountering huge speed problems.

The drive is Mapped through the API then I attempt to view the files. If I use normal controls (dir1, file1 etc) I can get info quickly but I can't get file date and file size info. if I use dir$ with filelen() and filedatetime() in a loop it runs like a dog (runs fine locally or on a fast LAN though). lastly I tried filesystem objects with file.size, .lastmodified etc in a for-each statement but it ran slowly too.

BUT If I use windows explorer then all the files appear quite quickly (a lot faster than my app anyway).

is there an API or something that will just grap the a whole collection or array rather than looping date and size requests? I think that that is the bottle neck.

The difference in speed between VB and explorer is about 1 file/second compared to 20+

HELP