>I posted a question here a few weeks back (on the Windows forum) and didn't get it resolved. I found the solution last night, and thought you might be interested to hear.
>
>I keep copies of most of my clients various databases on my laptop's huge harddrive. Different clients have different network configurations, so I find it useful to take advantage of NT and Win2K's ability to map drive letters to local shares:
>
>NET USE j: \\MyLapTop\Data
>
>To test my software as if I was on site.
>
>This works great when connected to the internet, or to my network at home, and use to work great with NT when on the road (unplugged). With Win2K however, unplugging the network cable caused my local shares to become unavailable, even though they were local. The simple act of plugging my network cable in to a live network (it didn't matter which one) made my shares available again. After some research, and talking to a few friends, I found that, for performance reasons, Win2K unloads the network service when it's not plugged in. This is a respectable feature, but it was causing an unwanted side effect with my development strategy. I wanted to be able to work on the road or on the porch, so I needed a way to fool the machine into thinking it was plugged in. I first thought I might use the Loopback adaptor designed for testing TCP/IP configurations, but quickly found that I couldn't install it on Win2K. The solution was to snip the end off of an ethernet cable, and leave about an inch of
>cable there, and splice wires 1 and 3, and wires 2 and 6 together, plug this stub into my network card (connect the box to itself) and this is enough to make Win2K think its connected, and cause it to start the network service, making my shares available.
>
>So I am mobile again. :-)

Great post.

I can't help wondering, though, if there's a Registry setting that controls that behaviour in W2K.