Hi everybody, I cant get rid of the red X when i map a network drive. i know it doesnot do anyhing different from NT4 but it is annoying. i edited the registry and set autodisconnect to the longest time possible (4294967295) , but it didnot work. any ideas? thanks!

when you go into that drive and exit the x goes away. it doesn't do any harm, so why bother with it?

i am not exiting the drive though...

I have this situation with a client. The drives disconnect by themself with a X but when you click on them you can see the files. If you try and save a file it displays the drive is not accessiable. Please help if anyone knows how to fix this. It is affecting all the clients connecting to the Windows 2000 server. Thank you.

Your not going to believe what causes this but I think I found the problem while looking into another problem. I tried setting the autodisconnect to -1 and this did not work. I tried other autodisconnect settings too and even tried several network cards (linksys LNE 10/100 TX and Intel PRO+). It still did not work. A few months later after trying everything I could think of and giving up, I was looking at my event viewer under system messages. I kept seeing the error message "Your computer was unable to automatically configure the IP parameters for the Network Card with the network address 00038A000011. The IP address being used is 169.254.3.161. " every day around the same time. I ran an IPCONFIG /all from the command prompt and noticed that there were two sets of IP addresses for what seemed to be two different network cards (even though I only have one in the computer). One of the network cards had used my DHCP settings and the other one had the setting 169.254.3.161. I realized that this matched the message in event viewer and so I decided to get my network properties and look at my LAN connection(s) again. I discovered that I have two connections. I looked at the properties on both. The first one was normal and the second one was AOL Wan adapter. It looks like it was trying to configure itself through DHCP but would fail so it would set itself up with 169.254.3.161. I decided to disable this 2nd network connection. Do a complete shutdown and do a cold boot. (This helps refresh DHCP, warm boots do not) The message was not longer in the event viewer and you guessed it, no more red-x problem. By the way, I am running AOL 6.0. So it is possible that this may interfere with W2K somehow. I am still able to connect to AOL as usual (through the T-1) though. Note: Another unusual event that I fixed just before this was "The value named IRPStackSize in the server's Registry key LanmanServer\Parameters was invalid. The value was ignored, and processing continued. " I fixed this be changing the LanmanServer\Parameters registry setting to Hex C That fixed another error event, but probably did not help with the red x. I wanted to give out all of the variables I tried. That's why I included this tidbit. Hopefully this seemingly unrelated fix will work for some of you out there.

This is an additon to my last article... I discovered that making the above changes disables the ability of AOL to connect to the internet, but if you change the tcp/ip properties of the WAN adapter as follows. Uncheck DHCP. (DHCP is a problem with this WAN adapter and slows down logon time to W2K.) Set the main ip address to something like 200.200.200.200 and the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0 and re-enable the WAN adapter. This will allow you to get onto the internet through AOL again and your red-x problem is still fixed! I don't quite understand why this works but it does. AOL and W2k just don't always play well together.