Sun 386i/SunOS 4.0/NFS query

[Larry W. Virden]

I am looking for some technical explanations of the following behaviour.

I am using a Sun 386i/150, running 4.0.1 .  We have local disks with the
SunOS on, swap and temp.  We have Vaxen running Ultrix 3.1 performing user
file serving.  We mount most of the Vaxen file systems
intr,hard,rw,bg,grpid .  What we see is that if one of the Vax goes down,
I start having windows freeze.  Fine.  I understand that if I were to try
to run a program which is on the downed VAX I am not going to get very
far.  But what I am seeing is that often ALL my windows - even rlogins to
other machines, windows which are strictly local (the clock!, console,
perftool, etc) no longer respond as well.  

While this is very annoying to me where it is REALLY causing folks grief
is those folks who are accidentally or unintentionall or even unknowingly
running things from my machine.  When it goes down, now they are down as
well.  Soon large numbers of folks go down!  

Anyone have any ideas why this type of behaviour would occur?

Thanks!