Word 2000 freezing browsing network

I have a client that is using Word 2000 for word processing. There is a share on their server where they are keeping all active documents. A couple of the workstations are running in to a problem where after having edited and saved several documents, when they attempt to open a document from the server, Word freezes as they try to scroll down the list of folders and documents. There is a lot of folders (1,600 or so) containing 15,000 or so files. Is that the problem or did I run into a bug?