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The Red X

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by dsherwood2000

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Why is it that when clients log on to their workstations in the morning there is a red x over their mapped drives? All clients are using a script that maps their drives for them, but until they click on the mapped drive the red x doesn't go away.

8 replies

by ntoz

Your clients more then likely are using persistent connections remembered from when they were last powered on. Thus even though your login script runs, the drive mappings are ignored because when the client comes up, it has already used those drive mappings from the remembered persistent connections. Thus the red x because the last state they were in was disconnected do to the server maintaining resources by default disconnects network shares after a period of time. Then when the user clicks onthe red x drive letter, it re-establishes the connection. Depending upon what client your using, you can change the registry settings to not remember persistent connections and this would not happen. Also there are registry settings for the connection time out for Windows NT & Windows 2000 you can set to change the amount of time it takes before a connection is disconnected for non-use.

See: Q238852

by ntoz

Under Windows 98, and Windows 95 generaly remembered connections are set under Network Neighborhood,Client for microsoft networks, properties.

by nettek

If you are using Windows 9x clients, check under Network Neighborhood -> Properties -> Client for Microsoft Networks -> Properties. Make sure that "Log on and restore network connections" is checked, rather than "Quick logon".

by vagab0nd

This question raises at least once a month and there were a lot of answers but let me ask you one thing:
Does it affect work in any manner? This may be a kind of a bug in Win2k but it does not make any troubles. You make fight it but think if it worths the time spent. I have these red Xs on all the mapped drives for more than a year and still not found any problems.
They may be annoying but just don't mind it.

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