So I have a wireless G network of XP Pro machines. I bought a new laptop which has Vista Ultimate. I mapped some network drives (the drives are on various xp machines and I mapped them to the vista machine). When Vista starts it tries to connect to the mapped drives BEFORE it is connected to the wireless network. This is stupid. I thought Vista was smarter than this and made for wifi networking. Win2000 had this problem so I switched all the PC's to XP. XP did not have this problem. XP handled the wireless networking flawlessly and mapped drives were no problem for XP. So why would Microsoft takes steps backward with Vista? Do I really need to remove Vista and put XP on my laptop so it can handle wireless mapped drives? Every day that I use Vista I see just how bad it is. Less functionality than XP with tons and tons of useless resource sapping "features".

So I am the only person in the world with this problem I guess

Hello, I understand your feels but please understand that the performance of wireless network depends not only on operating systems, but also the driver of wireless adapters. If Windows Vista cannot connect to wireless network before the try to access to shared folders, we may need to check if the network adapter is compatible for Windows Vista and the driver is fully updated. If I misunderstood your concern, feel free to post more details. I will try to help you based on your reply, thanks! Cheers, Lionel

That is not an answer. I bought this laptop and it came with this piece of *** O/S on it. I was able to access my network drive for months... Now, after applying one of the THOUSANDS of patches to this worthless O/S I no longer have access to my network drive. I wasted hours trying to figure out the problems... I successfully accessed the network drive from a XP machine and then even a Win2000 machine, but this piece of *** can't even find the drive.What really makes it worse is that the M/S Design idiots think they own my machine so they make it as complicated as possible to do any level of diagnoses to resolve a problem. I am an Ivy League educated engineer that built telecommunications code in assembly language, and I am struggling through the useless layers of *** preventing me from resolving this problem.So Tell us where to look to resolve this problem, and don't try to lay it off on some compatibility issue. And go back to the Win-XP interface for Network Management. When dealing with networking there is too much information to be managed to be covered up in the useless Vista interface.P.S. GET RID OF UAC "Useless (Roadbloack) for Acceptable Computing". I have kept it turned off for several months now so that it does not cause more problems, and interfere with normal day-to-day activities. How dare M/S think they know how I want to use MY computer.