dired hangs on nfs dir

[John Hunter <jdhunter@ace.bsd.uchicago.edu>]

I have several dirs on my LAN NFS mounted.  I cannot open them in
dired - find-file just hangs indefinitely when I try to open one of
these NFS dirs.  Interestingly, I can open files in the dir, tab
completion works, and TAB TAB lists all the files in the dir.

This happens also when I launch with -q --no-site-file.  Here is the
*Messages buffer*

    (emacs -q --no-site-file)
    Loading disp-table...done
    For information about the GNU Project and its goals, type C-h C-p.
    Loading dired...done
    Reading directory /home/jdhunter/tex/...
    Waiting for process to die...(type C-g again to kill it instantly)
    insert-directory: Quit


Any thoughts on what the problem may be or what I can do to debug it?
I tried restarting nfs on the server - no luck.

The same problem occurs on dirs from different NFS servers.  Locally
mounted dirs open fine.

Finally, this is a new problem.  A couple of weeks ago it worked fine
with the same version of emacs, the same OSs on client and server.

Thanks,
John Hunter

GNU Emacs 21.2.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars) of
2002-04-2\9 on mother.paradise.lost