Shared printers between XP clients sometimes disappear

I had an interesting problem in my office not long ago wherein users were complaining about printers that were intermittently no longer showing up in the Printers and Faxes folder of their computers.  All of the printers in question belonged to other users who had shared those printers to the network. 

I had been chasing this issue down for weeks until a lucky breakthrough made everything click in my mind.  One of the users called to complain again so I decided to open up Computer Management on the SBS Server we have in the office and connect to the XP workstation serving the printer.  Upon trying to connect, I got an error stating that the XP workstation could no longer accept connections. 

At this point, it is important to remember that Windows XP Professional based computers allow only 10 concurrent network connections.  Connections to file shares and printers certainly count.  Also, as far as I can tell, XP has no default setting for when a connection that is idle is forcibly dropped.  I searched around the web for a solution and found many that involved registry hacks and even ways to send those hacks out via group policy.  Well, fortunately, there is good news which involves using group policy but not hacking the registry.

Open up your group policy editor and edit the group policy container that contains the workstations experiencing the trouble we are discussing.  Navigate to the following:

COMPUTER POLICY | WINDOWS SETTINGS | SECURITY SETTINGS | LOCAL POLICIES | SECURITY OPTIONS

Look for the entry that says the following:

Microsoft Network Server:  Amount of idle time required before suspending connection.

See below screen shot (click to enlarge).

I have mine set to 2 minutes and so far so good.  We haven’t had any issues for over a week now.

Keep in mind that you may wish to set this only for workstations and not change the default for servers which is 15 minutes.  Also, if you do not have a domain, you’ll need to set this for every workstation independently.

  I hope this helps for those of you experiencing this problem

JamesNT