This was an odd one partially as it was in an xp mode vm running on Windows 7 and partially because the application that was having a problem with a mapped drive threw error messages that didn’t make much sense to the support company. The background was an application which runs from a windows 2003 server via drive letter mapped to a share – in this case drive x: mapped to \\servername\sharename. In windows explorer on the XP client vm the drive is shown as disconnected but despite right clicking and trying to disconnect – using the explorer context menu and even net use x: /delete.
This persists through restarts and reboots as well. Searching the registry didn’t yield any clues either. So how do you get rid of it ?
Two steps are required – you need an elevated dos prompt (run as administrator under xp) and then within the dos prompt use a timed AT command to run the following
AT 13:00 NET USE X: /DELETE /Y
Where the time “13:00” – is a moment or two ahead of the machines current clock.
Then wait until the time has passed and open Windows explorer to find your phantom disconnected drive gone.
HTH – I have now seen reports of the same issue in windows 7 – the same solution should work fine