I have Windows 7 Ultimate on my laptop. I have a Windows Server 2008R2 server, set up as a domain controller. The laptop is part of the domain. When I try to access mapped drives, often I get an error that the drive is unavailable and that there has been a possible attempt to compromise security. Sometimes it gives me a user/pass dialog to enter, and of those times, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I don't get a dialog at all. Most times I have to restart the laptop in order to connect to the mapped drives. Possibly related... When I initially did this, when I hovered over the wireless icon in system tray, the tooltip said the name of the domain under the AP name. Now it just says (internet access) under the AP name. I found a post somewhere that suggested changing a group policy setting relating to timeout of the logins (don't remember it off hand), so I went in on the server and made a change to the group policy. However, my laptop cannot find a domain controller when I try to force gpupdate. Active Directory cannot find a DC, either. Somehow my laptop continues to allow me to log in using a domain user/pass (which is a domain admin), however, it doesn't seem to find a DC for those other purposes. In my past experience after a number of days, a laptop (different laptop, different domain, different place) would stop allowing login until it found a DC, however this has been going on for months, and I'm still able to log in. What can I do to get my laptop to realize the server is a DC, and what may have caused this to happen? Thanks!

I would suggest dis-joining and re-joining the laptop from the domain. See the following article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/295017 After dis-joining from the domain, delete and re-create the computer account in Active Directory. In order to dis-join from the domain, simply join a dummy workgroup.

I did this, and now ADUC finds my DC, so it appears well. One thing I changed - my router. When I tried to rejoin the domain, it couldn't find a DC. I thought this was weird, since I can ping it using the server name. In my router, I had primary DNS as the DC, and secondary and tertiary were the ISP DNS servers. I removed the secondary and tertiary, and then it found the DC no problem. Interesting. So the laptop apparently wasn't using primary DNS, but somehow was able to find the server when doing a ping by server name. Since ADUC is now able to find the DC, I'm thinking the problem is solved, so I marked it as answered, and if the mapped drive problem recurs, I'll repost. Thanks.

Yes, it sounds like DNS was the cause of your problems. Maybe your laptop was using NETBIOS to do name resolution, unless you ping'ed the FQDN from the laptop. Anyway, all's well that ends well.