After upgrading to RHEL 5 update 8, not able to access submounts from the NFS server

Issue

• When mounting an exported tree with NFSv4 sub-directories within the entire tree should be accessible but are not. When attempting to access any directory below the top level export the following error occurs:

    ls -l /mnt/server/a
    ls: /mnt/server/a: Not a directory

• This problem did not occur until we upgraded to 5.8, and works fine if we downgrade to previous kernel 2.6.18-274.18.1.el5

• After upgrading the kernel to RHEL 5 update 8, can mount/access the root volume but can not access any filesystem that is submounted on it

• Not able to access Netapp .snapshot folder after upgrading to RHEL 5 update 8

#pwd
/home/user
#cd .snapshot
.snapshot: Not a directory.