file explorer disappears

efriggen · 23 Feb 2017

Goodmorning everyone,

I have a problem at the office and I hope you can help me fix it or tell me it's a windows 10 bug or something :)
We have several users that have documents on a network share with a very long UNC pad.
When they open the document, the document opens without any problem, but in the background the file explorer just disappears without an error or anything.
And when they want to open a new file explorer, it opens and closes immediately, I think because the long UNC path is in the quick access.
When I clear the quick access cache, it works fine again, untill they open a file on that network share again.
Does anyone else know something about this problem?
Hope you can help me.

Fafhrd · 23 Feb 2017

Long paths are still a problem. It's documented, so not a bug so much as a limitation.

However, long UNC paths are your responsibility, or that of your sysadmin.

On the server, you could use a short alias for the long UNC path perhaps? If you have:

\\Verybigfileservername\foldername\long_foldername\impdocs\files\rhubarb\gobbledygook\legal\

create a new share on the folder \legal with a short name legdoc thus becomes:

\\Verybigfileservername\legdoc\

when accessed across the network

Use an even shorter short alias for the UNC path?

On the user machines:

get the IPv4 address of \\Verybigfileservername

from command prompt admin>

ping verybigfileservername -4

copy the IPv4 address - e.g. 192.168.1.77

In the windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file with notepad, append your server IPv4address with a short alias (e.g. Srv1) after

127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.1.77 Srv1

and save the hosts file

now your UNC path becomes

\\Srv1\legdoc\

That's a somewhat flippant example - instead you may wish to replace Srv1 with a more meaningful short name to represent the path.