EXPLORER.EXE hangs when opening & network drives mapped

SOLVED

Basically when I map network drives (even just one) the EXPLORER.EXE file browser hangs. Admittedly I usually have at least 4 drives mapped at any given time. And they aren't always connected.

Now that I've removed all network drives and replaced them with "network folders" it opens instantly again.

I see the difference. The network drive link actually shows drive space used/free, not to mention a different context menu. And now it's making sense as to why it's slower.

I'm just wondering if anyone has found a way to get explorer.exe to load instantly with network drives mapped, and have explorer simply update the GUI and list the drives as they are pinged/detected, instead of the entire file explorer hanging?

I frequently access my local drives, and waiting for the network drives to be seen by windows is a pain.

Has anyone found a work-around for this? ... I might have to go back to Explorer++

SOLUTION

Delete drive mappings and re-map them.

Who knew it would be that easy...?

MORE INFO

It seems there's a bit more to this.

The mapped drives can still cause problems if there is some heavy network traffic going on. It doesn't have to be coming from/going to the mapped drives either. It can be as simple as an internet download going at about 2-4 MBps. At that point (at least for me) the entire computer is lagging (downloading to the local drive). During the download, I happened to think of my original post here and so I removed all the mapped drives again, and once again, EXPLORER.EXE came back as speedy as ever with no mapped drives.

So I want to pose the same question as above:

Anyone know of a way to get explorer to just list the mapped drives from cache/memory and then to poll the stats on free/used space? As opposed to waiting to get all that info first and then displaying the drives 20 seconds later?

Seems to me in Vista and later there are always hassles sharing entire drives. I used USB 3.0 docking stations with WD Black internal drives. Sharing the files over the Lan what I ended up doing was making a new folder in the root and dragging all the other folders into it. Then share the folder. It's not always a viable option. But it seems quicker and more reliable when possible to use that technique.

A better answer may be to use a third party file manager that doesn't bog.

Yep, I'm already looking at 3rd party file managers again. Explorer++ has been my favorite for a while...

Thanks for the reply.

Explorer should have a sanity check on the file/drive info stuff. I remember trying to copy Windows.old folder over a network via drag and drop. Explorer started counting the file objects instead of copying. After using RichCopy to copy Windows.old I saw it had over 260,000 objects. Explorer should quit when it hits a hundred. It would have been counting for days if I let it go on(or until it crashed.)