Explorer not showing Mapped Drives

[techccbcc 0]

I have a problem with mapped drives on a customer's machine that I am working with. Maybe someone has seen this before?

 

Commentary:

All workstations at this customer's location are loaded with Windows XP Pro and are members of a NT4.0 domain. The users login with domain accounts, which have been configured as Local Administrators of the PCs which they use. Each person's Domain Account has a customized logon which maps drive letters to specific resources using Kix32 (ver 4.10). The Domain User Accounts are not roaming profiles.

 

Problem:

One the users is experiencing problems with her mapped drives. When she logs in, her drives will map, but Windows Explorer does not display them (no icon, nothing to click). Furthermore, you can not run commands from "Start; Run" using the mapped drive letters. Shortcut's to files on the mapped drives do work however.

 

You can disconnect the drives, and reconnect them, and they will appear in Explorer. However, as soon as the user logs out and logs back in, they disappear, even if you choose "Reconnect at Logon".

 

I deleted the customer's Profile folder in C:\Documents and Settings, and had the system recreate a generic Profile. This seemed to correct the issue, but the next day, the user started expericing the same problem.

 

I had one of the Domain Admins check her account settings, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The problem seems to be O/S based.

 

Any thoughts?

[adamvjackson 0]

Is the NT 4 server using WINS to resolve Name/IP addresses? Have you enabled WINS on the client/workstation TCP/IP stack settings?

[techccbcc 0]

Thanks for the Tips, but unfortunately, NETBIOS or WINS didn't solve the issue.

 

I did, however, find the fix for anyone else who might have the same problem.

 

Running gpedit.msc, I drilled down to:

 

"Local Computer Policy/Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/System/Scripts"

 

In that template, there is an entry called "Run logon scripts sychronously". The default configuration is "Not Configured". I changed this to "Enabled", and her drives started mapping on their own.

 

I have only one theory as to why this user was experiencing this problem. It was related to a customized GUI.

 

The user has a very "clean" desktop, with no icons, and she has manually removed all "Windows" based icons as well. The only thing on her desktop is the Recycle Bin. I believe this is "over-effcient" for the speed of her machine (2.4 GHz P4), and the O/S loads faster than the logon script can process. This leaves the connections enabled, but Explorer doesn't know they are there.

 

Thanks for the help anyway, if anything the advice kept me in the ring to get it fixed.

 

-Mike

[Geni 0]

One possibility, for those using logon scripts on a domain (it's generally the user's home directory that doesn't map in these instances, and it happens sporadically) - this is a known problem with XP SP1. Try upgrading to SP2, and see if that resolves the issue.

 

See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330519