USB drive problems with XP

[krumel]

Any luck yet? We have got the exact same problem. F: is mapped as the users' homedrive. App's are connected to this drive. C is the HDD, D & E DVD drives. We have 1500+ machines, so we are looking for a script solution now. When we find something we'll let you know!

Good luck!

[skroo]

yeah, logon scripts defining drive mapping would do the trick.

This would be about the best way to do it. Assuming you're in an Active Directory environment, use GPO to have everyone who needs to mount those drives run the same logon script when they log on to the AD domain. You'll still have to go manually remove the drive mappings from each client machine, but at least that's a one-time fix and can be done with a single commandline instruction (`net use * /delete`).

Other advantages: you can synchronise system clocks on the clients to the server (very useful, I've found, for backup purposes, specifically if someone needs to recover a file as well as chain-of-evidence), any future changes are a simple tweak to the script and the clients get it the next time they log on to the domain, etc.

This should help somewhat in finding a solution. There're a lot of ways of doing this, so running through search results probably is the best way in this case. Just make sure that the examples are applicable to an AD environment if that's what you're working in - while the NT4 and 2000 methods aren't necessarily mutually-exclusive, there are things that work in one but not the other and vice-versa.

Also, out of curiosity: why do they need keyring drives? If it's a case of 'they don't need it but want to play with it', you might be better off (again, using GPO) disabling their access to USB devices.