Drive Mapping woes

[korifugi]

Greetings fellow 'geekers...

 

I'm running into an issue at one of my feeder schools that is seriously making me consider a windows interface (read base unit + velocity + window)...

 

I've been seeing in the past a bit of a phantom problem where network drives were not being mapped correctly - sometimes only a couple of the drives were being mapped, sometimes even none - but for the most part the drives all mapped fine and dandy - for the ones that didn't, a reboot often sorted the problem.

 

Over the hols I rebuilt all curriculum machines (Windows XP Pro SP3) to bring them up to date in service packs and also get rid of a minor annoyances like HP's basic software including things like a PDF creator that gets in the way of mapped printers and such like...

 

Now - drive mapping has seriously gone south, with it falling over more often that working, and rebooting isn't really working (plus - even if it did work is only a temporary fix at best!)...

A machine I tested with a staff account had no drives mapped, but then I logged on as a student and fine - no problem, logging on later as a staff member works while this time around the student account won't map network drives.

 

Drive mapping used to be done via a kix script, but after numerous headaches with kix scripting I decided to map them via a good old plain vanilla batch file using the net use command, removing another thing that may complicate the issue...

 

I've checked the permissions on the netlogon directory and users can read & execute from there so that's okay, while there are two different scripts, (one for staff, one for students), they are virtually identical aside from the staff one mapping one extra drive, so no problem there. (the script at current only sets the time via the server and maps network shares through net use - so no problem there).

The users do also have permission to use the shares they are trying to map and there is nothing else using the drive letters as the machines I'm testing on don't have card readers.

 

The only thing I can find that the machines do not like is when I have tried to ipconfig/release, then /renew one, just to ensure they have an updated GP - I am told that the RPC server is unavailable, but a check on the server (single server all site Windows Server 2003 SP2) shows the service running fine! Could this be the cause?

 

Any ideas people?

 

Thanks in advance

[korifugi]

Additional: Have found all this is due to the workstation service falling over on local machines, does anyone hav any idea what can cause this?