Shared drives on Vista stop responding...

Having a problem with a Vista SP1 (32bit) computer. It has a few shared drives that are used on a LAN which are hosted on this Vista box. After about 24 hours, the shared drives stop responding. If I try to go to \\computername\ to see the drives on another computer (xp or vista) it just sits with an hour glass, then says device not found after some time (EDIT: I think its 'the network path was not found' not device, sorry). The computer is online, responds to a ping, and if I do the same thing (\\computername\) on the local machhine, the drives list themselves. The computer is not set to sleep or turn off the Hard Drive, or hibernate, only to turn off the monitor. Heres the really odd part: Restarting the computer fixes the issue, but, if I hit \\computername\ on another computer, then go and restart the Vista machine, as soon as the logoff process starts, the drives come up and list on the remote box. Its almost like theres some service hanging up, and when its forced closed at the shutdown, the network sharing kicks back in. Once the computer comes back up, all is normal again, for about 24 more hours.

Nothing in the event log showing any problems.
Tried flushing/registering DNS, no change.
Tried disabling/re-enabling network card, no change.
Tried repairing network connection, no change.

We did experience this issue on pre-sp1 vista machines, but this one has sp1, latest drivers, and latest bios update.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Any ideas for troubleshooting this issue? I have checked and re-checked for spyware/malware, but nothing seems different on this unit then any others we have.

Try using the ip instead of the computer name and check your firewalls.

Is this a USB drive???

I have seen those go off line..hardware and chip compatiblity issues. Could be a bad cable too.

MLF

edit> vista is also limited to 10 concurrent connections...is this a peer to peer or a domain network??

Check your power management settings..esp for the NIC
and also if the sharedf files are on a usb drive (as mentioned)

The network card COULD be going to sleep.. and the machine need to have its Network values reset.. this is in spite of your manual attempts (flush dns etc)... being after 24hrs.. it seems that during the night it falls a sleep ??? the fact it is fine for more than a few hours ... like during your work day.. it prolly falls asleep after 2 or 3 hours.. killing the network..
Do you have other Vista boxes on the network with shared files?

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Originally Posted by cross

Having a problem with a Vista SP1 (32bit) computer. It has a few shared drives that are used on a LAN which are hosted on this Vista box. After about 24 hours, the shared drives stop responding. If I try to go to \\computername\ to see the drives on another computer (xp or vista) it just sits with an hour glass, then says device not found after some time (EDIT: I think its 'the network path was not found' not device, sorry). The computer is online, responds to a ping, and if I do the same thing (\\computername\) on the local machhine, the drives list themselves. The computer is not set to sleep or turn off the Hard Drive, or hibernate, only to turn off the monitor. Heres the really odd part: Restarting the computer fixes the issue, but, if I hit \\computername\ on another computer, then go and restart the Vista machine, as soon as the logoff process starts, the drives come up and list on the remote box. Its almost like theres some service hanging up, and when its forced closed at the shutdown, the network sharing kicks back in. Once the computer comes back up, all is normal again, for about 24 more hours.

Nothing in the event log showing any problems.
Tried flushing/registering DNS, no change.
Tried disabling/re-enabling network card, no change.
Tried repairing network connection, no change.

We did experience this issue on pre-sp1 vista machines, but this one has sp1, latest drivers, and latest bios update.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Any ideas for troubleshooting this issue? I have checked and re-checked for spyware/malware, but nothing seems different on this unit then any others we have.

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Network card power management is off, nothing set there. I have gone through a few tuts on unneeded vista services and disabled everything we don't need/use. So far, no loss of drives today after disabling these services yesterday. I don't really know why these un-needed services would have an impact though, mostly things like Cryptographic services, and tablet pc, things of that nature.

We do have other vista machines with shared drives, but not on this lan, each location has 1 vista machine acting kind of like a server, it has all the shared apps installed to the shared drives. For locations with more then 4 machines, we have a server instead. This is the only location having this issue though since we deployed SP1 to all vista machines.