Re:No-win situation (Score 1)

Agreed. Many of the technical solutions sound like they could help, but they either involve passive-aggressive behavior against a favored employee, or require a cash outlay to change a situation that's not perceived as a problem. Talking to the owner in a calm, reasonable, way /sounds/ good, but in my experience it can sometimes be impossible to get a manager/owner make an obvious decision even when there's no familial bias involved.

If you do decide to discuss this with the owner, make sure you frame the discussion in terms that are important to him (i.e., the bottom line) and make every effort to convey that this situation is costing him money; you should assume that the owner couldn't care less about the happiness of the affected employees (but might care about their productivity).

Aside: Although it's clear that remote accesses beating on the designer's workstation disk would slow down response for the designer, what I don't quite get is how the PD can get tolerable response time over the network. Has anybody explained to him that his /own/ work would go faster if he used local copies of the files? Or is he simply willing to put up with slow response to avoid the delay of copying the files to his local disk?