If you see your mapped drives disappear you may have a Group Policy that maps your network shares using the REPLACE feature. Another symptom I noticed
occurs if you remote (RDP) to a different PC and leave it for a few days, multiple mappings for the same letter will appear.
The simple fix is to set the Drive Map GPO to use the Action UPDATE.
To stop your mapped drives disappearing or automatically closing:
- Launch Group Policy Management
- Find your drive mapping GPO, right click on it and select EDIT
- Expand USER CONFIGURATION > PREFERENCES > WINDOWS SETTINGS > DRIVE MAPS
- Double click on the drive map that is automatically closing
- Change the ACTION drop down from REPLACE to UPDATE
I found this problem occurs on Windows 10, but others have found it on many older operating systems.
If this does not solve your issue, you might find this discussion on the Spiceworks blog to be helpful.
2 Comments
David Dawson · January 7, 2020 at 11:49 am
Thanks! This worked for a Windows 10 server. We had a Group Policy to map several file server shares using drive letters. Whenever we had Explorer open with one of the mapped drives and the policy refreshed (manual or automatic) then Explorer would crash. We changed the policy to Update instead of Replace for each drive and now it’s stable when we refresh the policy on that computer.
NetzwergBlog - Dennis Körner » Blog Archiv » Windows 10 schließt Netzlaufwerkfenster ab und zu von alleine bei per GPO ausgerollten Netzlaufwerken · May 5, 2020 at 1:43 pm
[…] Einer unserer Kunden hatte über Wochen das Problem, dass sich bei seinen Mitarbeitern auf einmal alle zum zentralen Netzlaufwerk geöffneten Explorer-Fenster schlossen. Schlimmer noch: Einige Programme stürzten einfach ab, wenn sich die Fenster schlossen. In den Ereignislogs war weder auf dem Server noch auf den Rechnern etwas zu finden und es trat auch nicht bei allen Rechnern gleichzeitig auf. Nach langem Rumsuchen und Ausprobieren bin ich über diesen Beitrag hier gestolpert: File Explorer Mapped Drives Close Spontaneously […]