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Craig Main

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MS Access 2013 does not connect mapped drives automatically

I have a user who is using Access 2013 on a regular basis and after reboot her mapped drives inside Windows Explorer work without issue.  If she then goes to an Access File and opens it (from Windows Explorer) Access opens but fails with a message that says it can not make the connection to \\whatever the path location is\folder.

If she opens Access first and browses inside of Access to the file when the file explorer window pops up the drive letters do not show as connected but they do show as connected inside the native Windows explorer of the OS.   Once she clicks on the drive letter it then shows connected and is able to browse to the file and open in Access.    From that point forward she can open the files any way she wants, from within Access or from within Windows explorer until she reboots.  Once she reboots the entire process resets.   How do I get Access to recognize those drive mappings on startup of the machine?

End user is an Admin on her own machine
She is running Windows 7 as the OS
All office and Windows patches have been applied
Laptop she is using is hardwired to the network.
Avatar of Jim Dettman (EE MVE)
Jim Dettman (EE MVE)
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This is a windows feature.   By default, Windows 7 will drop an idle connection after 15 minutes:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/297684/mapped-drive-connection-to-network-share-may-be-lost

<<How do I get Access to recognize those drive mappings on startup of the machine?>>

Make sure you check "reconnect at logon" when doing the mapping and then disable the timeout in the registry.

You can use a batch file at startup on the machine to issue a NET USE command, or to really cover it,  issue a NET USE command in Access using Shell() before the app does anything,

Jim.
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Jim Dettman (EE MVE)
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We've seen this happen on some machines with the Windows open dialog for apps beyond Access.

If Access is opened as Administrator, do the mapped drives appear?

Was the login used to map the drives different from the current login?
Avatar of Craig Main
Craig Main

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By the time we got back to user she had some other issues related to Windows like several other updates.   Once those completed and some other Windows related stuff was done the problem went away.   Thank you for your assistance.