Hey Doug!
Yes I have seen this - both on folders on a remote machine and folders on local drives.
My problem was files that I knew to be in a directory were not showing up in WPS. I have also seen where I drop a folder template on a drive object and the new folder does not appear - even after hitting refresh...
Ahh, good reminder. I had actually responded to your post back then for a slightly different reason, although it may very well be the same reason that's causing me a problem today.
I've had a re-occuring issue with XWP where WPS folders stop populating. In it's most obvious form the WHOLE folder goes blank, nothing shows up and the moment this occurs the whole WPS filesystem object structure is impacted. The only way to fix is to do a Desktop re-start, and if that hangs, well a re-boot is required.
Over the years I have tracked that down to what appears to be the very same crash in XWP. Take a look at the attached capture (all these entries show up in the xwptrap.log file), I shared with Rich Walsh previously (who I believe maintains XWP today). Unfortunately he has not been able to find the root cause.
Anyways, for now given that I suspect the two things I'm seeing here have common root cause I turned OFF XWP's folder refresh option. This means I am relying on the native WPS processing. I hate to say it but so far I haven't ran into a single occurence of either one of the issues I described above. This has only been a couple of days, so far too short of a duration to say this is IT...so more testing is needed.
Oh, btw: I'm seeing this behaviour with ALL file objects, regardless of whether they have EAs or not. In particular the NAS stuff does not have any EAs, b/c the ZyXel box Samba implementation does not support EAs.