I've got a ReadyNAS on my network and use two mapped drives in Windows to access it from that computer. I've noticed that if I restart the NAS that windows will display and continue to display "Disconnected Network Drive" next to both mappings in Explorer until I actually open them (double-click into them).

When this happens, other programs, such as uTorrent, that access one of those mapped drives seem to be unable to connect to them until after I've manually opened them in Explorer - in other words, windows won't remount them otherwise.

That was the issue up until a few days ago and was somewhat workable - every time I'd restart the NAS I'd then also restart Windows - this solved the issue mentioned plus it also enabled SageTV to once again see my network, as that ability would disappear when the network drives went down.

However, over the past few days I've noticed that the two drives just disconnect all by themselves. This seems to coincide with a firmware update I've done for the NAS to version 4.2.12 of RADIATOR. I'll manually go into the drives to reconnect them, but at some point in the day, they'll once again show up as disconnected. The current issue doesn't seem to affect SageTV nor the other software I've mentioned (uTorrent, etc.), and both shares can be accessed from those programs even when Windows is reporting them as disconnected.

I'm not seeing the same thing in Mac OS. When the NAS legitimately goes down, Mac OS will alert me quite quickly that the shares have been disconnected.

The NAS is accessed with CIFS/SMB from both Windows and Mac machines.

Any ideas? I haven't seen anything similar mentioned in the ReadyNAS forum yet. Is there any small program/agent I can keep running in Windows that will remount the shares? Is Windows even behaving properly with regards to the first instance of the issue I mentioned?