Access 2000 Performance in a Novell Net

I have recently installed an MDB on my Novell server with tables linked to an MDE application on the client machines. The clients are extremly slow when opening forms. For example, the main form with > 40 bound controls retrieves about 2000 records and takes 27 seconds to open. This is in contrast to C: drive performance of about 3 seconds. We are considering going to an NT server, or maybe a SQL Server for the back-end. Any advise?