[CentOS] My current directory is lost in a bash shell

This one puzzles me a lot:

[thba at vink layout]$ nc script/xw_functions.ample
NEdit: getcwd() fails: No such file or directory
NEdit: getcwd() fails: No such file or directory
[thba at vink layout]$ ll script/xw_functions.ample
-rw-rw-r--  1 thba thba 16829 Oct 25 16:59 script/xw_functions.ample
[thba at vink layout]$ pwd
/home/thba/workarea/colibri/design/ana/layout
[thba at vink layout]$ /bin/pwd
/bin/pwd: cannot get current directory: No such file or directory

This error occurs in a bash shell on a regular basis. The funny thing is 
that I can just access the file by cat:

cat script/xw_functions.ample

works fine (I get the content of the file).

To solve it for this shell I do this:

[thba at vink layout]$ cd
[thba at vink ~]$ cd -
/home/thba/workarea/colibri/design/ana/layout
[thba at vink layout]$ nc script/xw_functions.ample

And it is fine again.

This is a home nfs share mounted with these options:
arend:/export/home      /home                   nfs     
proto=tcp,nfsvers=3,bg,defaults        0 0

Both on the NFS server as on this client I see any errors or warning in 
any log. All kind of applications are affected by this problem so I need 
to dig into this deeper.

Server: FC3
client: CENTOS4.4

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Theo