Network Drives Losing Connection from Server 2012 to Windows 7 64bit Machines

Question

I have about 20 users at my facility and recently upgraded our server from one running server 2003 to one running server 2012. Since that occurred, I have had numerous issues that I did not encounter on the old server.
Lately, users have been losing connection to the shared network drives randomly and constantly. The drives will come back on-line on their own but it could be 2 minutes or 30 minutes before they do and when users are in the middle of working on a document
from the network, they are unable to save until the drive comes back. Manually disconnecting and re-mapping them works sometimes but then the problem will re-occur. I have tried re-doing the shares and security settings and run a couple of supposed hotfixes
on the client side and the server side to no avail.
Now our regional office is suggesting that I re-connect the old server and then rebuild the new one with server 2008 r2, something I would like to avoid if possible.
I feel like this is a simple setting that I am missing, no conditions have changed except for the new server.
The server is a Intel Xeon CPU E5-2609 2.40GHz with Server 2012 64 bit on it. All computers (except on on 32 bit) are running Windows 7 Enterprise edition 64 bit.
Please help.

Answer 1

I made this change to the registry on the server and am waiting to see if I have any more drops.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters
Value:
autodisconnect
Data
type : REG_DWORD
Value:
ffff (Hex)
There was a client side change suggested but I am missing that value for the client side change and others in the organization who don't have it are not experiencing this problem.