NFS oddity

["Corey Hart" <Corey Hart synopsys com>]

So I have a compute farm with a mix of Sun0S 5.8 boxes and RHEL3.0.  The
RHEL boxes are SunV20z, dual proc AMD, 16gig of ram.  All the machines
mount the same NFS volume (off a netapp filer).  I recently made a
change to a single text file on the NFS volume, .foo  .  The file had
existed and all machines could see the file previous to edit.  After the
edit all the Sun machines continued to see the file, but all the RHEL3.0
machines could not see the file any more.  They could see every other
file in the directory, except the one I modified.  If I did a more .foo
I would receive the following error message:

.foo: Stale NFS file handle

I could still run all the applications on the NFS mount, see every other
file, just not the one I modified.  

I then went and mv .foo foo  and then mv foo .foo and the file showed
back up on all the RHEL3.0 machines.  What the hell?

I am using a full install of RHEL3.0 release 3, no patches, default
everything that comes out of the box.

Any ideas?  Also there is nothing in /var/log/messages

...corey

PS:  This message resent on the request of jussi, let no one ever say he
is subtle.