Windows Explorer freezes for 30 seconds when I click on (or even mouse over) a disconnected network drive

Question

I have a network drive mapped in My Computer and displayed on the task bar beside my other drives.

Sometimes the server which hosts the network drive is physically powered off.

When the server is off, if I attempt to click on or even if my mouse pointer runs over the mapped network drive icon on my client machine, the whole of Windows Explorer (including the task bar and Alt+Tab screen) completely freezes and becomes unusable for about 30 seconds.

I assume this is some kind of "network searching" timeout period where Windows attempts to look for or connect to the (unavailable) network drive before finally giving up.

Is there a way to stop this behaviour or vastly reduce the timeout period?

The following or similar registry settings from other threads have not worked:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider]
"RestoreConnection"=dword:00000000
"RestoreTimeout"=dword:00000004
"DeferConnection"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters]
"SessTimeout"=dword:0000000a
"ExtendedSessTimeout"=dword:00000000
"ReconnectTimeout"=dword:00000004

Some "solutions" from other threads have also misunderstood the question. I believe my issue is actually very similar to this question but it seems like that question was totally misunderstood by most readers and in any case there are no actual solutions posted in that thread.

I want to make it clear that this is not a problem with the server - this is a problem on the Windows client machine misbehaving (taking too long to time out) when the server is switched off.

Answer 1

You should probably check the option to "reconnect mapped drives on reboot". I think it's an option in explorer, or when you manually map drives.

It won't specifically fix your problem, but it will make it happen less often.

Why? Because it sounds like this delay is windows trying to re-map / re-establish the network drive connection. If you have them auto re-establish on reboot, it will already be established, so when you click in, you shouldn't get that wait.

Of course, the less often you reboot, the more likely that connection can be severed.

A good drive mapping script run on startup can be very reassuring in this situation, but can require a certain amount of administrative maintenance.