I am trying to make sense of "oplocks". I believe I understand their 
purpose and am trying to disable them on the machine that acts as a 
server (Win 7) and the other machines (Win Xp & Win 7) that are 
accessing the files.

The purpose is to try to get the refresh thing to work properly as it is 
totally inconsistent at this time -my experiments indicate that success 
of refresh is linked to the direction of the wind.

Write-caching has been (always was) disabled on all machines.

I have scoured these newsgroups and found Liz's response(s) showing 
links but the community is n/a. I found one website but am not sure if 
the suggestions applies to all machines or, one is 'server' and other is 
'clients'. Do they both apply to XP and 7?

It looks like the first suggestion would be for all machines running 
Pdox and the second is for the machine acting as a server, but am not sure.

Can someone tell me what registry entries I need to make to disable 
oplocks? Please. Thank you.

> https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Microsoft_KB_Archive/296264

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MRXSmb\Parameters\
OplocksDisabled REG_DWORD 0 or 1
Default: 0 (not disabled)

Note The OplocksDisabled entry configures Windows clients to request or 
not to request opportunistic locks on a remote file.

You can also deny the granting of opportunistic locks by setting the 
following registry entry to 0:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
EnableOplocks REG_DWORD 0 or 1
Default: 1 (enabled)