Show an example may be very hard, because I'm try to tar a very big structure (992 files for over 1.5 GB). All what I can do is to send you a text file containing the output issued by tar, if you tell me how I can.
I'm using HP-Unix B.11.00 on a RISC machine, FS is a VXFS type and I didn't try to defragment the directories before.
In any case I can add another information. I tried to tar files beeing directly into the directory that contains them and tar returned a tar file as expected.
Bye