Office 2003 on Windows 7 - disconnected mapped drives

Here is the situation, and i've repeated it on more than one machine:

Windows 7 Prof 32 bit, with Office 2003 SP3 on a Dell laptop. Everything works fine when on the network and connected. If the user takes the laptop offsite without shutting it down first and still has mapped drives when he tries to save a document the drop down menu will hang any Office app.

To explain a bit more... in the Save As dialog box, the drop down menu to change locations it was freezes it up. After about 30 seconds or so the menu will finally appear and the application will be happy again. The user doesn't have that kind of patience though.


This isn't a new issue, I've found its due to the mapped network drives being unreachable. I do not have this problem in XP, only Windows 7. This is very annoying to the user. Short of removing the mapped drives with a script that the users has to run when they leave the office what can I do? I've looked around the web a lot and can't find much more than "disconnect the mapped drives" and I dont think of that as a solution so much as a work around. The user is the CEO of the company I work for and he often uses his laptop at home, then gets in the car and uses it on his way to the office (obviously he isn't driving himself) and then gets into the office and wants his drives to just magically work.

Also, trying to change how he uses the laptop won't work either. This is not a tech savvy user. This user also resist change (obviously, still using Office 2003).

Any thoughts or ideas? Thanks for everyone's help.

I feel for you - that being said, I would probably look into an offline folder syncronization solution.
You can trick these people into thinking they're saving to the network, but they will simply be saving to an offline folder that will sync with said network folders.

That is a great idea, however due to the structuring of the mapped drive (not my design) it would be a 400GB+ sync... and his laptop has a SSD hard drive that is only 120GB.

Thanks for the quick response, any other thoughts?

hmm, due to the small local storage drive we might need to rethink this.

Does his laptop have a WWAN slot available? Internal 3g/4g data card will keep him connected when he leaves the building, you can show him VPN and how to enable when leaving the office.

That would work except he travels in places where he loses signal a lot, we are out in the sticks. I think I am just going to make a powershell script to ping the server, if it fails, it unmaps the drives. If it sees the server, it maps them. Then just have it run every 15 minutes or so. I think that will probably work better. Also, he works on planes and such, not sure how well it work with the airlines :)

Thanks for the helpful ideas!

scheduled script will work -- CEO is all about finding ways to make it work for him/her

I know this is moving outside of the original post...Ive written a powershell script that will run, and works. I am just now trying to come up with a way to trigger it (more than just time) with NLA or some other form of network detection.

Thanks Brady for the help, I greatly appreciate it.

I do not consider this issue resolved, only that I have come up with a work around. There still seems to be a lingering issue with Office 2003 and Windows 7. I have found other issues with Outlook 2003 in Windows 7 and have not had any luck with that either. I think the bottom line here is that Office 2003 isn't a great match for Windows 7. The real solution here might just be to upgrade :\

Thanks again