It takes 10 mins for my shared (2.5 k files) to load. It depends not only on the no. of files but also the size of the files & the speed of your computer, & I suspect version of LW & OS. It took much, much longer to load half as many of the same files in Mac OS9 compared to OSX on the same computer.

Your suggestion sounds good. I don't know the practical sides to it.