The president of my company has a Dell Latitude C610 with a port replicator. He logs on the network normally and he has access to all of his mapped drives, but after a couple of hours, if he tries to open up a mapped drive he gets a message that it is not accessible. This has to all of his mapped drives which go to 3 different servers, if I reboots his laptop he again has access to all the drives. I update the network driver and also gave him another port replicator, but it still occurs. I checked his DNS, IP and WINS settings and they are all valid. Any Clues?

Dave, Do you have the same problem if you plug into the built-in network port? We had similar problems with C-Dock 2 Docking Stations, but found that the built-in port (or even a PCMCIA card on older models) worked fine. We updated the Dock driver, which resolved the problem. Of course, since you've already updated the driver, that's not your problem, but I've also seen W2k have problems if two installed NICs use the same driver. Personally, I'd have the user use his built-in port for a while and see if he has the same problem. That would at least isolate it to the port on the replicator. Let us know how you resolve it. Issues with Dell's docking stations and port replicators can be infuriating since there's so little support for them.

I had a similar problem with a user but the cause was the user was not "seating" the comptuer into the port replicator fully. You almost need to get your fingers under and squeeze until you hear the "click" then you know you are properly seated in the replicator. The user was losing network and usb connection intermittently until I would show up and "squeeze" the laptop onto the replicator.

Also, make sure the nic is not set to power save mode.

when you lose network connection, did you try pinging anything on the network ? try doing a ipconfig to see if your lossing your lease? try to set the laptop to a static ip address?? these are a few things you can try

I had the same problem a while ago. The computer lost it mappings when it woke from the 'sleep-mode'. Disabled the setting and it worked fine.