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Alistair McMillan
Asked: 2010-08-26 03:09:51 +0800 CST

Mapped drives not showing in first run of Windows Explorer

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We have a handful of Windows XP SP3 users whose mapped drives don't always appear in Windows Explorer when they initially log in. "net use" shows the drives are mapped correctly and they can see them in File Open dialogs in other applications. However they don't appear in Windows Explorer.

The current workaround we have is to kill Windows Explorer and then immediately start it again, then they do reliably appear.

Any ideas?

UPDATE: Still seeing this problem on some of our PCs. We're in the habit now of checking for any foreign DLLs being loaded into explorer.exe (Novell, Roxio, etc) and removing them, and making sure the PCs/users are in the correct OUs. This seems to solve the problem most of the time, but we've still got a number of PCs that won't show their network drives in My Computer when the PC first starts up even though they do show up in "net use" in a Command Prompt. But if you kill explorer.exe and launch it again, they do show up in My Computer. Anything else we should be checking for?

windows windows-xp mappeddrive windows-explorer

5 Answers

  1. You might try enabling "Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon" via a group policy or manually with gpedit.msc. The setting is in Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Logon.

    More info can be found here and here.

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  2. Are your users local admin of their workstations? If so, they may have installed a shell extension that is interfering with Explorer.

    Try installing this:

    http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

    and disabling anything that looks unnecessary.

    (Disclaimer: Never used this tool myself, but have seen various Windowsy people recommend it).

    You could also try getting the user to log on to a known good workstation and see whether the issue occurs there.

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  3. It's a bit of a long shot, but could it be that the mapped drives are empty? One of explorer's folder options is to 'Hide empty drives in the Computer folder' - this is set 'on' by default.

    • 1

  4. Hi I hope this is the solution to your problem:

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297694

    It may not be, but there isn't enough information in your post to be sure. Please try the workaround section, and if it does work best to call microsoft for a hot fix.

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  5. I found this on another serverfault.com post.

    net use x: \\computer name\share name /PERSISTENT:YES

    the persistent should make it appear in explorer. worth a shot :)

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