My Computer opens slow on Domain

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Protoform-X

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 30, 2002
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Here's a weird one. One of my clients is running a domain. He has 6 servers, 4 of which have shares that are mapped as network drives on his workstations. I believe there's a total of 11 mapped drives. This was working fine for well over a year.

Now he's reporting that My Computer is opening slow on all of his computers, but not every time. It takes about an entire minute to minute and a half when it happens. I got it to happen once out of 15+ tries. He's not overly concerned about it, but it is an annoyance and I would like to keep him as happy as possible.

There's two DC's, so I went through their event logs and cleaned up all the errors and warnings, but there's no change. Googling for answers on this one has been a nightmare. There's a ton of people reporting My Computer opening slow, but it tends to be due to spyware or stupid application installs. That can't be the cause of this since its affecting all the computers. I lean towards the mapped drives, but I can't put my finger on why it would work fine and then just start doing this. :confused:
 
The most likely culprit are your map drives. 11 mapped drives seems to be quite a bit. If any one of the 11 map drives are having trouble, it will cause your "my computer" to search and search and search. What I would do is delete all the mapped drives. Add them back one by one. Open my computer after each time you map a drive. Just keep doing it until your my computer starts hanging. You will eventually find the culprit(s).
 
Are the workstations using the IP of the DC(s) as their DNS servers? Check with an IPCONFIG, I've seen new routers get put in place, default setting of DHCP enabled on the router, hence the servers DHCP service shuts down.

Servers DNS settings correct too?

Antivirus real time settings on the clients...are network drives set in the exclusion list?

Servers been defragged in a while?
 
dragontales said:
The most likely culprit are your map drives. 11 mapped drives seems to be quite a bit. If any one of the 11 map drives are having trouble, it will cause your "my computer" to search and search and search. What I would do is delete all the mapped drives. Add them back one by one. Open my computer after each time you map a drive. Just keep doing it until your my computer starts hanging. You will eventually find the culprit(s).
Click to expand...

This, most likely it's one of the mapped drives

YeOldeStonecat said:
Are the workstations using the IP of the DC(s) as their DNS servers? Check with an IPCONFIG, I've seen new routers get put in place, default setting of DHCP enabled on the router, hence the servers DHCP service shuts down.

Servers DNS settings correct too?

Antivirus real time settings on the clients...are network drives set in the exclusion list?

Servers been defragged in a while?
Click to expand...

Which leads us to this, if DNS is screwed and it can't find one of the servers that it has a drive mapped to, then it's going to hang. I'd make sure you can properly resolve all the short names of the servers your mapping drives to first and go from there.
 
Wow. Fast replies.

-I'm able to resolve all the server short names.
-The anti-virus is Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security, so it ignores mapped drives by default.
-DHCP is not in use on the workstations or servers. No new hardware has been added to the network, so there shouldn't be any DHCP server conflicts.
-The servers could probably go for a defrag.
-I'm getting a list of mapped drives and their locations so I can setup a test bed adding them in one by one.
 
Protoform-X said:
-DHCP is not in use on the workstations or servers. No new hardware has been added to the network, so there shouldn't be any DHCP server conflicts..
Click to expand...

So all machines are static IPs done manually?

Just for giggles I suppose ensure a problematic workstation has the correct DNS settings, should be your DC(s) IPs, not the router, not the ISPs servers. No changes of DNS services on the servers, with state manual IP settings on the clients?
 
Yes, all workstations are using static IPs with static DNS entries set to the DCs IPs.
 
Soooo.

I mapped each of the drives one by one, closed My Computer then opened it again after each one. The problem never occurred. I'm waiting for the connections to time out now to try opening it again.
 
Still no luck on this. He just informed me that when this happens he also loses his RDP connections and SQL connection. It doesn't happen on every workstation at one time, but more like one by one every 15 to 20 minutes.
 
Errors in event logs?
A switch about to fail?
Wired..right, not wireless?
Any really oddball long named files in the root of the drive that some mapped drives are mapped to?
 
Not 100% sure. All the event logs are clean(servers and workstations). No disk errors or anything mentioning anything network related. The switches are nearly brand new Dell PowerConnect 2724's, however failing hardware seems to be a possibility. The entire network is gigabit ethernet, no wireless.
 
Any of the mapped drives encrypted?

Had this happen to me once, a user thought it would be good to check the encrypt box... Took me a while to figure it out
 
No, none of them. When all of the mapped drives are removed from a system, the problem doesn't occur. If any one of them is added back it does occurs.
 
No, they're all to file shares on the servers.

I had him turn off all his applications and services that access the mapped drives and it still made no difference. :(

I went ahead and created him a login script that deletes all of his mapped drives and then recreates them with the NET USE command. He's testing it now to see if it helps at all.
 
I've found that unchecking "Automatically search for network folders and printers" in Tools, Folder Options, View has sped up opening My Computer at work.
 
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