Loss of Connection to Network w Windows7 x64

BI 2010-04-07

We recently installed 5 new Dell workstations, with Windows 7 64 bit. Running SW 2010 SP 2.1, all users have been getting an error message (see attachment) when they are trying to save files which are stored on a server (Windows 2003). It seems we are losing the connection to the server briefly. After selecting OK in the message, the Save-as dialogue is entered and the files will save properly.

It doesn't happen all the time. One day a workstations sees many of these errors and the following day there are few or none.

Nothing changed on our network (Gigabit HP switch) and servers (Windows 2003) and everything was running fine on Windows XP and SW 2009. We opened a support case with our SW vendor but they say they don't troubleshoot network issues.

We also sometimes see mapped network locations with a red X in Windows Explorer on our Windows 7 workstations (see attachement). When we select a drive with a red X, the connection to the server seems fine. Could that be related?

There are no network-related error messages showing up in the event logs of the workstations. We also checked the switch to see if anything strange was going on with any of the ports. We even switched around some connections to see it was a bad switch port but that didn't make a difference.

At the same time, we switched from:
- Windows XP to Windows 7
- Old hardware to new hard ware
- SW 2009 to 2010 (SP2.1)

Could this be hardware, OS, network, server, or SolidWorks related?

Solidworks Administration