Slow connection to server in Word

When using the Novell and Microsoft clients, on a Win9x box, for connectivity to my servers, MS Word 97 opening and closing docs on the novell server takes 32 seconds each. I was able to get this down to 1 – 2 seconds by removing the ms client. The problem is I need ms client for my SQL server. Does anybody know of this problem and any work-arounds?