Phantom network drive in Win7

I've never run across this before, at least not to this degree. Occasionally in Win2000 or XP I'd forget to delete a temporary network drive when I was through using it, and upon restarting would get a message "Windows can not connect to the network drive" or similar. Deleting after the fact fixed it.

My wife's laptop has Win7 on it, and apparently at some point in the past she had created a network drive. It's long gone now. The only drives showing in Disk Management are C:\ (Win7), D:\ (Storage) and E:\ (DVD/CD drive). I find no evidence of any network drive, yet upon every startup there's an icon in the notification area with the above unable-to-connect message. I've even changed the network name, hoping to clear the network connections cache, but no luck. I find nothing in the Boot tab of msconfig, either.

Anyone have a suggestion for getting rid of this?

This should be a lots of fun to track down.

You might try a registry search for various drive letter possibilities to see if there is a leftover entry that might be causing this.

Lots of interesting possibilities at the links below. You may want to check them out to see if any ideas might be usefil.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&site=&q...w=1112&bih=779

Does it at least give you the drive letter?

Did you try clearing all network drives from command line?

net use * /delete /yes

The registry contains mapped resources at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Network. Manage them using regedit.exe.

or

Open a CMD window.
Enter Net Use to see a list of mapped resources.
Enter Net Use \\computername\sharename /delete to remove a mapped resource.

For help enter Net Use /?.


AFAIK in Windows 7 /yes will return an error. It is only used with the persistent parameter as /persistent:yes.

No, not even a drive letter. Thanks for the command-line suggestions, I'll try them tonight after I return home and will let you know what happens.