File Explorer closes when viewing mapped drives and other SMB Shares
We've been dealing with an issue involving File Explorer closing, seemingly randomly, when viewing mapped network drives and other SMB Shares. The network connection(s) to these locations are not lost, as far as I am aware, and can be immediately reopened when they are closed.
By "randomly" I mean that I have not found a consistent time or location within the shares that will cause this behavior. Active use of the file explorer seems to have little effect on whether or not the window will suddenly close, though from my personal experience with the issue it would appear that the windows close more consistently after an undetermined amount of inactivity.
Environment Details:
- Our clients range from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro (various builds). I do not recall those running Windows 7 having the issue.
- The File Server hosting the shares runs Windows Server 2008 R2.
- Primary DC runs Windows Server 2012 R2
My current culprit is a Group Policy configuration managing the mapped drives. My thought is that these mapped drives are "refreshing" and causing the open windows to close.
Any insight or thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.
That's probably because you set your drive mapping as "Replace" instead of "Update" or "Create". If that's the case, then your assumption is correct:
Replace will disconnect the drive, then map it again. So, I think you should update your group policies and set your drive mapping preferences as "Update" instead of "Replace"
More details in the documentation
[...]The replace action represents a configuration where the extension replaces a new mapped drive with a new mapped drive based on the configuration in the current inner element.
It is important to understand the difference between replace and update. The replace action typically deletes the existing mapped drive and creates a new one[...]