We have customers that are agencies of a major insurance company, and they have converted from computers owned by the insurance company to computers owned by the insurance agency. Here is the setup of the computer network with the insurance company-owned equipment prior to conversion to agency-owned equipment: Cisco VPN router on special circuit ordered and managed by insurance company The number one computer in the agency, running Windows 2000 Server, is used to share the agency's public folder The other computers in the agency are running Windows 2000 Professional All of the computers in the agency can access the agency's public folder, and have the agency's public folder mapped as a network drive Here is the setup of the computer network after conversion to agency-owned equipment: All computers are running Windows Vista Business Service Pack 2 32-bit The number one computer in the agency, running Windows Vista Business, is used to share the agency's public folder The other computers in the agency are running Windows Vista Business All of the computers in the agency can access the agency's public folder, and have the agency's public folder mapped as a network drive We had customers reporting problems with accessing files in the agency's shared public folder over the network with Windows Vista Business. The problem does not occur all of the time, but tends to occur when more than one user is attempting to access the agency's shared public folder. They have reported their computers locking up while accessing files over the network. Here is how the scenario can be reproduced: Set up a network of computers running Windows Vista Business Service Pack 2 and Office 2007 Small Business Edition. Create a shared public folder at c:\Shared_Folders\Shared_Public. Be sure to grant everyone Full Control to this folder, and be sure that this folder is a shared folder. Put some documents in the shared folder created in step #2. Map the c:\Shared_Folders\Shared_Public on all of the computers by selecting Computer from the Start Menu, and then clicking the Map Network Drive button in the Computer window. Try to access and modify documents in the shared public folder simultaneously. You might experience the problem that our customers have reported. Has this problem been fixed in Windows 7? Is there anything that I can do in Windows Vista to fix this problem? We really need to get this issue resolved for our customers.

Apologies if I'm being daft here, but don't you really need a server OS to share off reliably? You mention that inthe 'after' scenario above the agency's number one computer is running Vista Business.My thinking would be that simultaneous connections would be limited and governed by virtue of the intendedusage of a workstation OS license.

This might help: http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t599056.htmlI ran 'net config server' and got a response of 20 logged on users (max) with a session timeout of 15 minutes for Win7 Enterprise, and a maximum of 10 users for Vista Business. So if you're mapping a bunch of drives to a Vista Business machine and more than 10 differentusers access files on the drive within the timeout period then the Vista machine wouldn't accept any new connections. At least that's how I'd interpret it. Even mapping the drive in the first place wouldcount as a user logging on wouldn't it?

Hi, I also suspect this issue may be related to the simulations number of accessing the share folder. Please try the following to adjust this number: 1. Right-click on the share folder, select Properties, and switch to Sharing tab. 2. Click Advanced Sharing and you will see the item Limit the number of simulates users to. 3. Just adjust the number to see how it works. In addition, if there are too many users to access the files, the network bandwidth may be not enough. Please also check this. Thanks.Nicholas Li - MSFT