>First off, I should know this answer, but...
>
>Our application was designed to connect to drive across the network through mapped drives. But, if the local machine is rebooted the drive appears in the drive listing but is not available until it is accessed by the user via Explorer. Is there a way to programmability touch the mapped drive to allow access?

It sounds like you may be relying on Windows to "remember" drive mappings across reboots. A more reliable way to achieve this is to put the following commands in a .CMD file that gets run at workstation logon, or in the system logon script if you're on a domain:

REM Assume we're talking about drive H:
REM First, delete any pre-existing mapping for H:
NET USE H: /DEL >NUL
REM Now, re-establish the one we want:
NET USE H: \\MachineName\ShareName /persistent:y >NUL