Disabling ipv6 and LLTD on Win7 had no effect still troubleshooting and will keep posting progress....

What is strange is some machines drop their mapped drives (quick double click to reconnect the drives but awful and damaging for all who connect to databases), these machines also drop shared printers (doesn't reconnect as gracefully, will say theres a printer issue for a few solid minutes first before one can print). Yet some machines, same computers (Optiplex 780s for Win7, 760s for XP machines) run perfectly fine (so can't be hardware/drivers) One of the machines that drops mapped drives is connected to a Samba server running RHEL6, this could be a samba issue, but then I have another client connecting to samba on RHEL5 and its fine To throw another monkey wrench in, win7 mapping to shared XP drives on an XP Pro machine loses its mapping more often than the samba computer! and win7 mapping to a shared XP Pro printer does the same, this happens variable between 5min and an hour, the Samba connecting one loses connection about twice a day. On domain to win2003 SBS, win7 drops all maps about once a day, I have scoured forums, wikis, and there seems to be no concrete result (hence this being my first post), from replace your router (which really makes no sense) to various local policies, registry entries, and sharing/device settings What I have tried: Autodisconnect to an obscene number, (65,356) to 0 and to -1 same with Keepconn, didn't do anything LanManager, net config server/workstation 128 bit versus 48/56 bit security turn off power savings on NIC disable/uninstallation of MS Security Essentails disable Firewall Static IP versus DHCP Homegroup toggle off and on The only thing i can think of is maybe some computers haven't been kept up to date as the earlier win7 machines that i've deployed seem fine, and the new ones (always update before install at a client) that have been fully updated have issues I'm not willing to put these on a domain (many of these outfits are 4-5 machines, nonsensical for a domain) What I haven't tried, mainly due to needing more info, is I want to change all network settings in terms of authentication, connection, methods, etc... to be the same exact way XP does it, (NTLMv2 to NTLM?) but I don't know what to set, in my mind this seems to be the definitive way to fix it... Another solution I'm going to try is installing LLTD on the XP machine (not sure if SP3 comes with it, its available for SP2 and higher) this would make the 'replace your router' fix make sense, but only for routers like cisco/linksys (as they come with it)... Any ideas? This is a widespread issue with win7 and vista as well. The only thing thats different on these installs are how up to date they are when they were put in, beyond that the differences are minor QBES to EZClaim to eClinicalWorks, to others, but even within these minor differences some machines connect some are finicky Thanks -Carl

UPDATE: Windows 7 machine loses connection to DB thats connecting solely over UDP The issue lies within UDP!!! Netbios, File Sharing, Samba, DNS, all that good stuff uses UDP! Somewhere in win7 there has to be some UDP settings to tweak, match the same settings to XP Either that or UDP is not stable in windows7 and MS screwed up and we gotta wait for a patch Forcing "Enable NetBios over TCP/IP" instead of letting it get from DHCP server (would speak to the replace your router fix, this UDP issue, and how the timing goes) in advanced settings in network adapter in ipv4 settings

POSSIBLY SOLVED!!!! its been a day (well 4 hours, need to test more) and so far so good no losses on my machine which connects to drives on XP with WINS resolving the address and XP via IP and an OLD version of Samba this makes me think about the hosts file and static routes now, if these are defined it would seem like it would fix the issue as well! i'll implement this at my most troublesome box, if this fixes it i'm marking this as answered!

So, yes this is what must be done 1) Enable TCP/IP over netbios (adapter properties for NIC, advanced) 2) Edit your hosts files a) Goto %SYSTEMROOT%\systems32\drivers\etc (gotta love linux, but why linux style in windows?, /etc? really?) 3) Inside is LMHosts and Hosts add your entires per Hosts: WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ myhostname per LMHosts: WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ myhostname #PRE 4) If you have a WINS SET IT TOO!!! This issue has now not appeard for a week, i call this solved especially when this issue happened consistently and constantly throughout a day's period -Carl