The screenshots I sent are accurate. The asterisk appears when you first connect to a node, and then disappears when you hit sync changelist hence the difference. What p4 commands is it running to ascertain if the whole workspace is clean? We run one big workspace per node and utilize streams for projects and engines which is different to how I’ve seen Epic do it next door. Running a p4 clean -n on the whole workspace is going to take a while so doesn’t look like that’s what it is doing, let me know what associated command you are using and I can run it to see output.
Have you tested this for the case where someone is syncing just the project directory rather than project and engine with switchboard?
Martin