Networking problem 1

[cyberprof]

I've got a Windows XP pro laptop at work that has stopped accessing a mapped network drive. It used to connect no problem, but now it can take up 10 mins for the window to populate the folders in the mapped drive.

The network is DHCP, and an IP address is being assgined. I can browse the network fine, it's when I try and access a resources or a shared folder that the system hangs for about 10 mins.

All of the other laptops work fine. Firewall is enabled but configured correctly, there are no virus.

Any help please, this is driving me mad.

Cheers

J

 

[bcastner]

If this is a persistent mapping, remove it and recreate it. Try:

Start, Run, CMD
net use * /delete
net use /Persistent:no

Then recreate the map and report back here.

 

[linney]

Mapped Drive takes forever to open in XP!
thread779-935638

 

[bcastner]

linney,

That particular thread still bothers me. There was not one suggestion by the user that WebDav was involved.

And I suspect in this user case the same is true.

 

[linney]

Finding information on causes for slowness in mapping to a drive is a little bit harder than other topics (personal opinion of a non-networked user), perhaps you have some links I could pinch?

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q="mapped+drive"+slow+open

http://groups.google.com/groups?q="mapped+drive"+slow+open&hl=en&lr=&start=0&sa=N

 

[bcastner]

A Start, Run, net use x: \\valid_share_server\valid_share should take no time at all if there is no underlying issue with the connection in a physical way. A permissions or logical issues may take longer to report back a specific error.

This poster is presenting a different issue, one where either through the logon script or through checkmarking a map to 'reconnect at logon' the actual browsing of the share takes a very long time, or does not succeed.

In a Win2k domain you would start by looking at client issues, of which the many detailed in faq779-4017 essentially argue that the issue is most likely a problem with DNS configuration.

There are other issues with SMB signing, and opportunistic locking, for Win2k servers that are not at the current service pack level. The general catchall article from MSFT is the following:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;814112

A more agressive discussion of the issues, and some excellent workaround advice can be found here:

http://users.bigpond.net.au/hutch/win2k/win982kbrowse.html

Which can be summarized at the moment: your Domain servers should be at the current service pack level, and your XP clients should be using SP2. There is a ton of fixes for XP as Domain client included in SP2 that are not explained or emphasized as they should be. (e.g. where and XP SP1 client redirector was expected to take 35 minutes or better to resolve new Browser entries, the SP2 redirector takes around two minutes.)

In my own practice I start the Windows Networking definition section by:

net use * /delete <== remove persistent user maps
net use /Persistent:NO <== to state I do not want any map unless specified to last beyound this logon session

The hard thing is outdated shortcuts in Network Places, or user defined shortcuts. All you need is one outdated entry in My Network Places to make the selection of an active shortcut a crawl.

Last thought: One of the issues of a Network mapped drive shortcut that is little appreciated is that Explorer acts differently in the context of a mapped drive. For a remote share it attempts to read, interpret, and cache all of the subfolder desktop.ini information, and the icon information. It does the same for a local Folder, after asking it to be read once. But the remote information access is slower (it is after all remote), and more likely to be flushed from the cache than the iteration of a local filestore. You have the additional complication that some file types (.AVI and .MPG come to mind readily) can be legnthy and the XP Explorer process lengthy, to try and pull the details required to enumerate the folder. One thought I had was to iterate through a Folder and subfolders and remove any Folder customizations such as a desktop.ini file.

Early results are promising, (and I promise a definitive "slow browsing" FAQ by the end of the year for the Forum). But for this particular thread, the source of the problem is likely found in the advice at the beginning of this post.

 

[bcastner]

I apologize to all, lengthy was mis-spelled repeatedly above.

Sigh. I do know better.

 

[cyberprof]

Thanks for all your advice. I will try them out tomorrow when I'm next at that office.