I have a network consisting of Linux Server, Win-Nt & 95 OS. I am able to connect from Linux to Win-NT using either ftp / telnet in time. But it takes me around & more than 50 seconds to connect from Wint -Nt/95 to Linux using either ftp/telnet. My network is small & it hardly consists 20-25 systems.
usually when you connect via ftp or telnet to a Linux box, it will try to resolve the hostname of the machine that is connecting. If it can't do that due to DNS failure, etc it will hang for a while until it times out. If this is the case in your situation, then a fix would be to add entries to your /etc/hosts for the Win NT/95 machines so the Linux box knows their hostnames.
Let us know if that doesnt help and we can explore further.
Also, if you are running daemons which use <B>identd</B> services to "authenticate" incoming connections and the identd services are not set up correctly, the initial login will be very slow and hang for some time. (this is almost the same as the DNS lookup problem).
I recommend putting a sniffer like <B>tcpdump</B> on the segment and watching what happens. This will isolate the problem quickly.