Connection to Windows Network Shares

Question

After installing 10.5 I lost my automatic (Active Directory Domain mapping upon logon) and manual connection to some of our critical Windows network shares. All worked fine under 10.4. All connection attempts fail and report in a dialog:
Connection failed
There was an error connecting to the server. Check the server name or IP address and try again.
Manual connections then report in a dialog:
Connecting to Server
The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in
"cifs://netstore2.colgate.edu/student6" could not be read or written.
(Error code -36)
Some of our servers connect fine but two of our most important servers do not. I haven't found a clear description of this in Apple support forums (but may have missed it in the flood of problems reported).
I have something that works for me based on something I read on the web (perhaps in one of the threads on http://www.macwindows.com/leopard.html but I can't find it now).
Our automatic mappings and my initial manual attempts use the FQDN (fully qualified domain name) for our server - netstore1.colgate.edu. Replacing this with netstore1 works! I have no idea why (Something to do with WINS? Apple engineers?) but I'm using it for myself and others.
That is:
cifs://netstore1.colgate.edu/employee2/dwheeler fails (as does smb://...)
while
cifs://netstore1/employee2/dwheeler works (as does smb://...)
I just duplicated this failure/success using mount_smbfs, where the failure looks like:
$ mount_smbfs //[email protected]/employee2/wheelerda ~/temp
mount_smbfs: server connection failed: Software caused connection abort
and
$ mount_smbfs //dwheeler@netstore1/employee2/wheelerda ~/temp
simply works.
Hopefully this will help someone while Apple fixes the problem (they can probably blame Microsoft, but remember that this all worked fine in 10.4).

Answer 1

Please make the following changes
On the Server whose map drives you don't see
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters
Value: autodisconnect
Data type : REG_DWORD
Value: ffff (Hex)
On windows 7 client 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters
Value Name: KeepConn
Value Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 65535 (dec value in seconds)