AutoCAD MEP 2010 under Windows 7 pro 64 and Mapped network drives?

[mdhutchinson]

Under Windows 7... We have set acad.exe to run as administrator... but now all the mapped network drives go away.

Has anyone else seen this issue?

[TravisNave]

That's because the drives are mapped under your user profile, which is not being used.  They need to be mapped as administrator as well. 

[mdhutchinson]

What do you mean - "...under my user profile, which is not being used" ???  The AutoCAD Profile?

What am I missing?

The behavior is the same... I set the acad.exe to run as administer... and the drive mappings go away... so I turned it off on the properties of acad.exe..  I then tried to right click on the start up icon and run as administrator. The Taget field uses /p to hard wire to call the profile. The drive mappings still went away.

The target is:

"C:\Program Files\AutoCAD MEP 2010\acad.exe" /p "My Profile" /w "My WorkSpace"

[TravisNave]

No, your *Windows* profile.  Mapped drives exist as part of your Windows profile.  When you log in, your mapped drives are unique to your login.  When you login as local Administrator, there will be no mapped drives.  Thus, when you run your application as Administrator, it is running separate to your profile.  Confusing, right?

[mdhutchinson]

okay... yes it is confusing...

you said... "When you login as local Administrator, there will be no mapped drives. Mapped drives exist as part of your Windows profile.... " this makes complete sence... however, at the point when I right click on the AutoCAD startup icon... I've allready "logged in"... uh... as in booted the computer and logged in with my login info.

Are you telling me that when I run acad.exe as administrator... it's somehow using a windows profile that isn't actually current?

I have an issue with AutoCAD 2010 and Windows 7 and working to solve a display issue that I posted on our subscription ... Autodesk support told me, amoung other things, to set the acad.exe to run as administrator... are you tellimg me that this is the way windows 7 runs... running 'as administrator' actuualy uses a diffeent windows profile.

Why would autodesk support tell me to do this when they know that most all users in anykind of network corporate environment have mapped network drives?  ... even the dang drawing file is on a network drive.

We had a similar issue with Windows 7 going to sleep... then when the user used Alt+Cnt+del to log back in... the network drives were all gone. There's no diffenet profile other than the user's profile being used there. To correct this issue... we changed the Windows 7 machine to not power down.

[TravisNave]

Yes, when you run AutoCAD as Administrator, you are essentially launching the process with the credentials of the Administrator profile.  It would be the same as logging off of your current user and logging back in as the Administrator and launching the program.  Therefore, AutoCAD is living within its own credentials separate from seeing your active profile.  It cannot see the mapped drives as your logged in user because it is not running as that user. 

[sssteve72]

Have you ever thought about adding a logon script to the domain you log onto (assuming you log onto one) to automatically add specific mapped network drives to anyone or selected people logging on? 

For example when anyone at our office restarts their computer they eventually come to the logon screen.  We type in our user name and password and we logon to our domain.

At the local level i.e. my computer I am setup with administrator rights and at the server level I am setup as a user so that I cannot get into things I shouldn't be getting into.  But every time I logon a script runs and I always have my mapped network drives.  It's great when you get a new computer you simply logon and your mapped network drives are there.

I can't tell you how to do it and I am not even sure I am calling it by its proper name but contact your network adminstrator and they should be able to make something like that happen.

[TravisNave]

That's a good idea.  However, running as local Administrator is using a machine account off the enterprise AD.  So the script will not run for the user in this case.