I ran into this problem before. One of our engineers had a script that kept some temporary data in his home directory, which went crazy at one point and generated millions of files (no clue the reasoning for this). Anyways, this was HELL on our backup solution, which ended up failing several nights in a row on that area. Luckily, since the files were largely useless, this left our options open. I think the kicker was the 'rm' command not working (same issue as listing? This was a Solaris 8 system I think). I believe we ended up moving all of the other data off of that filesystem and newfs'ing it.