asked on

Mapped drives lose login info after reboot/logout

More an annoyance than anything... I have a customer running WinXP Home on a workstation. She has two mapped drives - F and H - and connect to shared folders on the office "server" (i.e., beefed up PC running Vista Biz). Oddly, she can open/utilize the H-drive w/o a problem, but when she tries to connect to the F-drive, she is prompted for login info. Her user name is already listed in the box, and she uses "no"/"blank" password. In other words, here, she just hits OK, and she connects to the folder.

The annoyance is, if she forgets to run through this login procedure when first booting, or after logging out/in Windows, apps like Word and Excel throw an error when trying to access the mapped drive. Logging into the drive first, allows apps to use them normally.

My quandry is...where is this login prompt coming from? The "server"'s shared folder setup, or from the workstation mapping the drive? Why does H work w/o the prompt, but F prompts? Is this a Home vs. Pro thing?

Thanks very much, in advance, for any suggestions. As they are a distance away, and I'm not due back there for a few days, I won't be able to try solutions right away. When I get on-site again, I will take and try all solutions and report back as to what worked. Thanks much for your help and patience!

itsmein

To solve this , on the XP Home workstation, do this.

Start - Control Panel(Clasic View) - User Accounts - Advanced (tab)- Manage Password - click Add

Enter the Server IP and then the username password. It shouldnt prompt for passwords again.

SC

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

tenaj-207

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

Styphon

I had a very similar problem to this. I had set my folders up using advanced folder settings. From the Window go into the folder settings and in the view tab and at the bottom check the "Use simple file sharing" box and then reboot.

slam69

just remap the driver and click the remember password box when mapping

Styphon

Did you get anywhere with this?

CThomp2005

ASKER

My apologies for not getting back with this.... I'm actually heading out there now (literally) to try the approaches listed above.

I will report back as to what solution worked.

Thanks much for all the input and your patience... Be back soon!

CThomp2005

ASKER

Okay...the verdict is in... Thanks to everyone who submitted. I went through the solutions one by one and here are the results... Reminder, this was for XP Home (SP3)...

itsmein: There is no Advanced tab in the User Accounts area (actually, there aren't *any* tabs here - even in Pro).
slam69: There isn't a Remember Password checkbox (I believe that is found in Pro, not Home).
Styphon: Their server is running a version of Vista Biz. Don't think simple file sharing is an option in that. Honestly, I didn't even check - really didn't want to dig into the server.
tanaj-207: Tried this solution last, and with a minor tweak, it works like a charm.

At first, the net use didn't solve anything, as I was still prompted for login info. I found that there is a password parameter than can be entered after the share:
net use f: \\server\share [password] /user: /persistent=yes
Entering an empty string "" to simulate the blank password solved that - no more login prompt. Secondly, with persitent=yes, upon boot, the user would get a message in the notification area saying that not all network drives could reconnect (very annoying). I'm guessing the net use didn't kick in and pass in the login info before Windows tried to reconnect the mapped drives - thus the error. I changed persistent to "no" so the drives would be "destoyed" at shutdown/logoff, and recreated at login, and that took care of the warning message.

Again, thanks much all for the various solutions...and for being patient until I could get back to the system...

CThomp2005

ASKER

Thanks much, tenaj-207. Funny how, even now, we need to fall back on DOS once in awhile...