Server 2003 + Win 10 Pro Mapped Drive Issue

Question

Hello all, I have 8 windows 10 PCs, all identical, a Windows 7 Pro machine with 1 shared folder and a Windows Server 2003 which shares 3 folders. All PC's have access to server shares with their own username/password. Windows 7 PC doesn't require a login.

Only 2 machines have an issue where the mapped drives sometimes don't open after a restart or shutdown/turn on of the workstation. The issue is intermittent, sometimes I can restart the PC 10 times and everything works fine, I can access the mapped drives on server and Win 7 PC. But the other times I cannot access the shared folders on the server, but I can still access the shared drive from the Win 7 PC and can still access internet and can ping server. But when I'm not there the person who uses the machine says it doesn't get fixed after reboot.

I tried connecting to server with IP and server name, still have the issue. The best way to replicate the issue is if I open a bunch of folders from the server on the workstation, restart, and then the mapped drives from server can't be accessed, no error, Explorer just freezes up. Won't even let me right click to unmap the drives.

The drives can be mapped as F: G: H: or X: Y: Z: and still get the same issue. I've tried to replicate the issue on another PC that nobody uses and it happened there too. I added a new user on the server and that didn't help.

This issue only affects 2 out of 8 PCs, mainly because I don't want to mess with a working machine to see if I can replicate the issue.

Firewall on/off doesn't fix it, in registry editing ProtectionMode from 1 to 0, 1 to 0 didn't work. SMB1 is enabled, as is on all machines. Stop start "Computer Browser" doesn't fix it. Changing IP address and rebooting fixes the issue, but next day it comes back; but also just rebooting PC fixes the issue most of the time.

Only thing I was able to find, was in event viewer for SMB Client was an error saying something like connection terminated because server took too long to respond.

I'm not a genius computer whiz so all my attempts at fixing this were from Google searches.
I'm not at this location often, but I need to fix it. Please help if you have any ideas. Otherwise I'm going to reinstall Windows in a few days and hope that it gets fixed.

Answer 1

Alright, best way I could figure out on how to fix this, was to create a batch file that maps the network drives every time the PC starts. So far it's been working.