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hypercubeFlag for United States of America

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Will a shortcut to a share necessarily cause a Shared Folder/Session on the target computer?

I had conjectured that there are two ways to access a share:
1) Map the  share to a drive letter on the accessing/client computer.
2) Create a shortcut to the share.

My theory was that:
- the mapping will cause a session to exist all the time
 and that
- the shortcut won't cause a session unless the shortcut is used and as long as the folder window is open.  When the folder window is closed, the session will go away.

But, I'm having a bit of trouble proving this to be the case.  When I create a shortcut, a session is also created (and no shared folder window is open on the "client').  Is there a time after which the session will be dropped?  Will the session stay indefinitely?
Refreshing the Shared Folders/Session window doesn't show the session going away right away at least - even after the window on the client is closed.
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Dave Baldwin
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In another question we found out that putting a shortcut on the desktop causes Windows Explorer to open the shortcut (or try) to find the icon to put on the desktop.  It also gets all the info you would see in a right-click context menu.  So the answer is probably yes.  And it probably gets re-opened every time the desktop icons get refreshed.
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ASKER

What I'm trying to do is reduce the average number of sessions without manually closing sessions.  It appears that closing either a shortcut-opened window or a mapped drive-opened window on an XP "client" pointing to a Windows 7 Pro "file server" does indeed close the associated session - rather immediately.

I'm not so much looking at what probably happens but what happens, and perhaps why, in a more definitive way.
I thought I told you.  Every icon on your desktop causes Windows Explorer to open the file associated with it to get the icon that is displayed on the desktop and the file information that is displayed when you hover over it.
The answer is simply "no, it won't". The shortcut's target is not checked. Anybody try if you like.
Well, just to be clear, I would not be referring to a shortcut to an individual file, rather, a shortcut to a folder.  I don't think a folder gets anything but a standard icon that need not be retrieved from the share.  Isn't that right?
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McKnife
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Hmmm.... this continues to be interesting.
I have a Windows 7 Pro computer being used as a file server (mostly for reference material, printer drivers, etc. and probably some active Office documents).    
At last check, after working hours, it had 15 sessions.
So, if the last observation from McKnife is the case (and it appears to me also to be the case) then why are those sessions active?  Some had been opened for 6-7 hours.  Yesterday some had been opened for over 20 hours.

An hypothesis is that not only are there mapped drives on the "clients" but people have opened a file and left it open.  Otherwise, how could this be happening?  Yet, I must say, I doubt that this is the case as well.
I've requested that this question be deleted for the following reason:

The question has either no comments or not enough useful information to be called an "answer".