I have an employee who has is using a Sony Vaio laptop with XP Home and is connected to the network like everyone else, he has Novell Client 4.9 SP2 on it, we have a 5.1 server. He keeps getting disconnected after being idle for awhile and cannot figure it out, I've seen this in the past when the laptop goes into hibernation but we've disabled that and also in the power schemes set it to always on but it isn't working. Any thoughts? Thanks!

I guess I should also mention when he comes back to try and access a network drive it will tell him he doesn't have access, and if you hit ctrl alt del, it says that the user logged off and if he tries to log back in it will tell him the tree or server cannot be found and he has to reboot to log back in. Thanks again

Hello network guy, do you think the issue could be the OS. Novell Netware client does not support XP home but 4.9 sp2 is supported in XP Pro. I have never installed the client on a xp home machine because of this. Have you managed to get it to work ok on another xp home PC with no problems? Turn it off, wait a while, turn it back on again.

I've got some customer's computers running XP home machines with the Novell client without an issue. I'd eliminate that as a compatibility issue.

I thing the problem sits in the configuration of the network card. In the nic configuration there is an option to "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power". If this option is marked the nic will disconnect from the network and after the watchdog interval the user will be logged out from the network.