Mapped Drives Losing Connections

From: bcode (anonymous_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 05/23/04 

Date: Sat, 22 May 2004 21:10:54 -0700

You might try:

On the XP Machine, go into
 - Control Panel -> Network Connections.
 - Get properties on your Local Area Connection.
 - Click on the TCP/IP protocol, and get properties on that.
 - Click the "Advanced..." button on the General Tab.
 - Goto "WINS" tab, and put the dot in "Enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP."

Your 2000 Server has NetBIOS enabled by default, but XP only enables it
when the DHCP server tells them to. But I would assume that your router is
your DHCP server, not your 2000 Server box. Enabling this should solidify
your network connections overall.

I hope this is of some help.

bcode.

>-----Original Message-----
>If anyone can offer any suggestions for a problem I'm having, it would
>be greatly appreciated....
>
>Our small business has a network with a a server running Win 2000
>Server version, and we have 5 workstations, each running WinXP Pro. We
>have a router for our LAN as well. Lately, our workstations have been
>loosing connections with the mapped network drives on the server. One
>suggestion I found was to increase the value of the autodisconnect
>function in the windows registry file. It doesn't seem to be working,
>although I only changed it recently. When the connections get lost,
>opening up "My Computer" will show a red X on the network drives, and
>double-clicking on them does nothing. For now, I simply reboot the
>server and log back in & out of the workstations. Our tech support guy
>reccomended installing a domain controller on the server. Even though
>our network is setup as a Workgroup, I would think that having updated
>all workstations to XP Pro would help to avoid this problem. If anyone
>can provide suggestions about similar experiences, I would be
>grateful!
>
>Thanks,
>Tom
>.
>