Some Notes in Microsoft

When this article was first written, 12/3/2009, when I searched the web, I found lots of pages which stated that drive letter mapping no longer works at all on Windows 7, or no longer works reliably enough to use.  Well, I spent quite a bit of time over a number of days working with a Microsoft rep who agreed, trying to work out a way to use shell libraries as an equivalent replacement — and while this was going on, lots of updates came in, and VBscript network drive letter mapping began working flawlessly.  Here is sample code:

On Error Resume Next
Dim objNetwork

Set objNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")

objNetwork.MapNetworkDrive "Q:", \\SERVER_NAME\SHARE_NAME

However, new installs of 7 still often will not map drive letters reliably via login script.  All updates seem to be needed for this to work, even as of right now (3/3/2010).

Libraries can give a different problem.  Supposedly if one installs Windows Search 4.0 into Server 2003, libraries can then easily include both UNC and drive letter maps from the server.  But it doesn’t always work.  To make it easy, use this tool, the Win7 Library Tool:

http://zornsoftware.talsit.info/?p=3