Windows XP Computers disconnect from shared drives on Windows 7 comp

On this network there are three Windows 7 machines and two Windows XP machines. One of the Windows 7 machines is acting as a server providing all the other computers with shared folders that they network to via the "map network drive feature". The two Windows 7 machines connect to this central Windows 7 machine no problem. But the XP machines will sometimes lose connection to the network drives when accessed. They cannot see the network drives until the central Windows 7 computer is restarted. The other two Windows 7 machines have no problem connecting, even when the XP machines are having problems.

I found this article and wanted to check here to make sure it was applicable to my situation before I go ahead and muck around in the registry:
Mapped Drive Connection to Network Share May Be Lost
Problem is, the article says this:

On a computer that runs one of the versions of Windows that is listed at the beginning of this article...

There aren't any versions of Windows listed anywhere in the article, or none that I can find. In addition to that, it doesn't specify whether I'm supposed to be doing this on the server end or the client end. I would assume the client end but it's just another thing I want to make sure of before I go ahead and do it.

Thanks for any replies!

Uh... bump?

I have the exact same problem, just upgraded 'server' from XP Pro to Windows 7 Pro and now the mapped network drives will become unaccessible. Takes a reboot of the server to fix.

I can however successfully ping the Server even while the mapped drives are unavailable, I also turned off all firewalls including the built in firewall on the 'Win 7 Server'

Any suggestions would be great.

The fixit on that page I linked to seemed to have worked for me.

Thank you for the reply. I was considering upgrading the machines to win7 but will try this first.

Did you end up installing the fix on the server or client side? Or both?

Thanks again for the quick response.

I ran it on the server.

Just an update for all others that my be having this problem.
Resuni, thanks for all the help however that fix did not solve my problem.

It took a few weeks but what finally fixed it was changing the registry settings as per link below (both links below point to the same answer).
windows 7 stops sharing files
System error 64 - the specified network name is no longer available

Below solution is taken from Aaron's answer on the second link above: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters\size
Your choices for this registry key are 1,2 and 3.
1 = Minimize Memory Used
2 = Balance
3 = Maximize Throughput for File Sharing and Maximize Throughput for Network Applications

Be sure to set this to (3). By default it is configured to 1.


I applied this change 1 week ago and have not had a problems since, prior to that it was happening several times a day.
Thanks for all the help.

Thanks for the update. If things start acting up for me again I'll definitely look into that.

I have the same problem with 2 XP machines loosing the mapped drive connections once a day. The suggestion to change the registry key in \CurrentControlset\Services\lanmanserver\parameters\size to change from one to 3 sounds good. Except I do not have such a key in my registry although this is a complete new Windows 7 installation. Any suggestions?

Sorry for my previous post. I did find the setting in the registry after all. I made first a search and nothing came up but then following the directions on the original post I found it and set it to 3. So now let's see if it works.