Excel can't open network drive!

[Meneos]

I have a PC in my office that can navigate to a network drive via My Computer
or Windows Explorer, but when the user tries to navigate to the Excel
document via the Open... button or menu option in Excel, the computer hangs
up and will not proceed and I have to kill the process. Does anyone know
what causes this? I have recently noticed longer waits at the Welcome Screen
when it boots up, I don't know if that is related. Any help would be great!

 

[Dave Peterson]

Just guesses...

How many network drives are mapped?

I think I'd experiment by getting that number down to one to see if that helped.

Or if you experiment by opening Windows explorer and go into each of the mapped
drives first (just to make sure that they're available), then (right away) open
excel and try file|open, does it work better?

If I remember correctly, I had similar trouble. The fix I used was to make a
registry tweak (win2k, I think) that changed the "disconnect time" to never.

(And I use those "disconnect timeout limit" in layman's terms.)

I'm not sure what version of windows you're running, but if those experiments
helped, then maybe making that registry tweak would help:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q138365

From that KB article:

The purpose is to disconnect idle sessions after a set number of minutes. The
number of minutes can be set at a command prompt using the net config server
command.

For example, to set the Autodisconnect value to 30 minutes, you would run the
following command line:

net config server /autodisconnect:30

The valid value range is -1 to 65535 minutes at the command line. To disable
Autodisconnect set it to -1.

<<snipped>>
• The registry does not allow you to add a -1 value. However, that modification
may be made at the command prompt with the following command:

net config server /autodisconnect:-1

=============

You may want to double check with a trusted member of your IT staff.

 

[Meneos]

I am using XP on all computers in the office. About 8 network drives, all
necessary. No other computers are having the problem and this computer is
only about 4 months old. I don't know whether there is a time out on network
drives set as the default in XP, but I will take a look at it. All other
programs can navigate to that network drive just fine, only Office has
trouble, specifically Excel.

 

[Dave Peterson]

Please post back after you've tested.

Remember to take notes before you disconnect your 8 drives.