Hello,
I have a small office domain (7 workstations, 1 server). The server is running Windows Server 2003. 6 of the 7 workstations are laptops, and all are running Win XP Pro. I have scripts to automatically map our main company file server location, as well as each users “home” drive. We also have central databases on our server for our project management and accounting software. The server also acts as a print server for our 2 printers. At startup, everything maps correctly and printing and database access are fine. Throughout the course of the day, every user in the domain gets “booted” from the file server. If the user is mapped to the server alias, they get an extremely (painfully) slow response (2-3 minutes to open a typical Word document). If the user is mapped to the IP address of the server, they simply get a “local device is already in use” error. Today I removed the script and simply accessed the server through Internet Explorer using the IP address. When the poor response began, I attempted at that time to map a drive, and received the “the drive could not be mapped because no network was found” error. The first instance of this phenomenon almost always seems to occur about an hour after logon, and it will happen no matter what the usage pattern is (whether you log on and go idle for an hour or if you are typing and working continuously). It is interesting to note that when we have this problem, printing and database access are uninterrupted. So even if I cannot access the shared files, I can access the shared databases and print to printers on the same system. This seems to happen about 3 times a day to everyone in the company. Yesterday I turned off the ‘autodisconnect’ feature on all of the workstations, and that had no effect. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!
