BTW, my .ini file is on the D drive then the same relative path.  I used standard windows (i.e. nothing hokey) to movie the Documents, and some other dirs, to the D drive.

I use the NAS by name, vs IP, and though I do specify my own sharing (specifically, I have the NAS directory shared as a disk and its sharing is specified through the NAS interface). Homegroup is apparently turned on (win 10). 

As per the DNS being 15% slower, 15% isn't the issue.  I think we're more in the 10,000% ball park.

From what I've seen in the past, the kind of delay I'm seeing here suggests something that's querying every file in that directory one at a time (and so a directory with a lot of screenshots is going to aggregate to huge latency).  Perhaps I should make a test screenshot dir on the nas and drop increasing number of files in there to see it it scales.

If that's the case, I guess the only way i could imagine dealing with that is to take over the update of the clip plane (some more manual process).  Easy for me to write.  ;)