RHEL AS-2.1 U3 extremely slow - nfs issue?

[Jayaraman, Siva]

hello all,

We are in the process of moving to more recent distributions of RH viz RHEL
AS-2.1 Update3 & RH AS-3.0.

We have kickstart infrastructure in place deploying RH7.2 and RH AS-2.1
distributions.
The kickstarts are done over NFS.

The new distributions were added to the NFS server (which is the same as the
DHCP server).
But the new kickstarts (AS-2.1-U3 & AS-3.0) take an extremely long time now.

The older kickstarts install around 800M of pkgs in about 3 minutes, whereas
now the newer kickstarts take around 50 minutes to install 650M of packages.

I checked the network connection and it is always 100Mbps Full Duplex for
both cases.
The only difference I notice is that I get this message on one of the
virtual consoles - 
	"nfs: mount version older than kernel"

The older kickstarts mount the nfs directory as nfs v2 whereas the newer
kickstarts mount the directory as v3.
Could this be the source of my problem?

The NFS server is a RH7.2 box capable of doing both v2 & v3.

If anyone has suggestions on how to debug/correct this problem, I would
highly appreciate it.

thanks!
Siva Jayaraman