Shared drives not connected, despite "reconnect at signon"

[Algebe]

I have several shared drives. When I start up my computer, they are always marked with a red cross, and I have to click on them twice manually before they are recognized and the green "connected" icon appears. This happens on all of our computers, so I have to use a desktop sharing program to make sure all the other computers have access to the shared drives.

In contrast, if I plug in a thumbdrive, Windows immediately recognizes it and brings up the directory. Why can't Windows do the same for my shared drives? This problem goes back at least to Windows XP. Why don't you fix these things?

 

[Trouble]

I'm not sure that I have an actual solution..... more of a suggestion.
Try assigning a static IP address to your machine or machines hosting your network shares and use that IP address when mapping network drives on the other machines.
Rather than relying on NetBIOS name resolution to sort out who's who and what's what every time a computer is started or restarted to sort out who is the Master Browser and who will host the network browse list.

As a matter of fact if you are running a small network and you have multiple machines hosting network resources (folders, printers, etc.,) it might be a good idea to use all static IP addressing for all network nodes and remap the network drives
\\192.168.1.xxx\ShareName (where 192.168.1.xxx is the host IP address and ShareName is the name of the folder you're mapping to).
Rather than
\\ComputerName\ShareName

Just a thought.