My girlfriend uses a network share at work, i.e. while physically present in the office with her laptop, or from home using a VPN connection. She uses Windows 10 Home (19041.610) and has added a network drive (Z:) from Windows Explorer.
Unfortunately, this leads to a lot of issues when she's not connected to the VPN, I'm wondering if it's a bug in the new Windows 10 version. Basically, the Explorer just hangs indefinitely. You'd think there should be some sort of timeout, but apparently there isn't. So for example, when she opens the "Save As" dialog from Word, Word just immediately freezes forever. She has waited for an hour and nothing changed. The "net use" command also hangs. When she clicks the "Add attachment" button in Outlook, Outlook freezes. Etc.
The only way I was able to fix this was to disable the Workstation service (it couldn't even be stopped), reboot. Enable and start the Workstation service. Delete the network drive. Then everything would work again, but of course then she couldn't use the network drive anymore. I added it back and the issues reappeared, too.
I have googled and found that there are lots of settings for this. For example discussed here: How do I set the Windows network timeout for physically disconnected mapped drive?
But I'm not sure which one would be relevant here. It would be nice if the Z: drive was always visible in Windows Explorer (disconnected, even after a reboot), and if she could simply connect to the VPN when she needs to access it, without it otherwise having any influence on the system.
