Start Menu Freeze When Hovering Over Link to Machine that's Turned Off

[enter8]

I have a network of about 7 machines. At any given time, around 3 are turned on. Every machine has start menu links to shares on all the other machines, all grouped by machine. When I try to click on a link on an active machine, my mouse frequently hovers over one of my inactive machines and I have to wait about 10 seconds for a response. It's actually pretty much impossible, as I move down the list to reach the machine I want, not to hover over an inactive machine and get the lag.

It seems that when you hover, the normal behavior is to poll the external share in some way and if the link is broken, windows waits. Is there a way of turning this off? And, no, I'm not willing to turn off the expand menus when hovering feature- I use the start menu way too much to add those extra clicks for drilling down.

All I want is for the start menu to display links quickly- whether they're currently broken or not.

 

[MilesAhead]

I don't see how you can avoid the network time-out unless you set up some kind of script that dynamically adds shortcuts as the network share is activated and verified.

I had a similar programming issue where I show a list of recently opened folders for relaunch. Before loading the list I check that each folder is valid(so that I don't show deleted folders etc..) If the folder is on a network share and the network share is no longer connected, that adds about 10 seconds for each network folder checked.

No way around it that I know of.

 

[RainoT]

use shortcuts, those arent checked at hoover

 

[enter8]

I don't see how you can avoid the network time-out unless you set up some kind of script that dynamically adds shortcuts as the network share is activated and verified.

Actually, thanks to your mention of 'network time-out' I was able to take another shot at google, and, while I didn't come up with an ideal solution, I think I can hack something together with batch files. The bat files will be local (and thus always be available) and each will trigger a network share. I did some preliminary testing and it looks like the only downside is that network shares opened via bat take a tiny bit longer to open- like maybe 200ms. I think I can live with that.

Thanks.

 

[MilesAhead]

I don't see how you can avoid the network time-out unless you set up some kind of script that dynamically adds shortcuts as the network share is activated and verified.

Actually, thanks to your mention of 'network time-out' I was able to take another shot at google, and, while I didn't come up with an ideal solution, I think I can hack something together with batch files.
...

I used to do the same thing when I had 2 desktops networked. I never used the Explorer automatically reconnect feature. It just had too many side effects. I had a bunch of .cmd batch files to net use various combinations to specific drive letters. That seemed to work better than anything.