Your network access was interrupted. To continue close the database and then open it again. Windows 7

Hi All,

RESOLVED

I work as an IT Administrator for my company and we had this issue when we moved from windows XP to Windows 8.1

Every 10 minutes or so this error would occur on our databases, and not on any other MS applications. We checked our internal network several times and found no fault.

After weeks of surfing the web and attempting most of the things, It was something very simple that actually resolved the issue, and with everyone else having their own resolutions, i'd thought i'd chuck in my 2 cents.

Our databases are stored on a 2008 R2 server that our users map a drive too. What I done was instead of having the users map to the DB's I created shortcuts on their desktops. 

Right click the shortcut and go to properties, the "Target" and "Start in" both had paths using the mapped drive letter so: J:\business\databases\db.accdb

So all I done was changed the mapped drive letter to the unc path, the shortcuts now have "Target" and "Start in" path of \SERVERNAME\business\databases\db.accdb

Users now use them shortcuts for using the databases and I haven't had any issues in 5 days that this has been in action. Really hope this helps other folks like me.

-Jamie

Why would you post a link to Experts Exchange? That is cruel to people who don't subscribe.

Thanks. the picture is the "two blue blocks" (It's meant to be a picture of office buildings i think). I didn't realise it was even clickable - the text is not.

Update:

I deleted the other network locations but I still got the network access interupted message.

I have a completely different solution...

Our network is running 3 Windows 7 PCs (no other O/S), this error just started happening randomly one day and then it became more and more frequent to the point that I was starting to wonder if I would have to replace Access with something else. Prior to this when we were running 3 XP PCs I never had this problem once in more than 7 years.

Worse than the lack of network access was the database corruption that often accompanied a network access interruption. I have no idea how but duplicate records were being introduced into the database as a result of the network interruption even though the tables had duplicates not allowed and I was always creating a new and unique ID as the primary key for each new record. Even more bizarrely the database would then drop the primary key on the table that had the duplicates. Once that happened the database would be unusable until I manually went through, removed all the duplicates and added the primary keys back on. Access should have blocked the duplicates completely, not let them in and drop the primary key (with no error or warning messages of course). This corruption was occuring 2-3 times a week!

Anyway that's the background to my problem. I tried EVERY single fix suggested here and on other sites, not one of them made the slightest bit of difference to the network access interruption. I also tried reinstalling Access, did not help, tried different A/V programs, that did not help either. I had also noticed that network copying had become very slow, I changed some network card parameters and solved this but it did not help the primary problem.

One day I found the answer purely by accident and here's what I did (note that this solution is appropriate for a single network environment, I cannot vouch for what you should do in a multiple network environment):

1. Go to the Network and Sharing Centre
2. On the left it side under the "View your active networks" section it will tell you what your active network is, click on the icon with the 2 blue blocks (that is the picture icon not the text), this will open the "Set Network Properties" dialog box.
3. On the "Set Network Properties" dialog box click on the "Merge or delete network locations" text, this will open the "Merge or Delete Network Locations" dialog box. Note that you may need to enter an administrator password.
4. On the "Merge or Delete Network Locations" if you see more than one network then you may have the same problem I did, merge or delete as appropriate until there is only one network and remember its name.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for all computers on the same network ensuring they all use the same network name.

The above solved the problem for me permanently and ended months of frustration and wasted hours. In our network the 2 "client" PCs had Network, Network 2 and Network 3 defined. The "server" PC had only 2 of these 3 (I can't remember which 2). I can only guess that Windows 7 was trying to switch between these phantom networks and thus interrupting the network connection. Note that in our network all 3 PCs are running virtually identical software and hardware configurations, the server computer has all the Access tables and the 2 clients interface to these tables using their own copy of an Access database with forms, queries, reports etc.

I hope this post can help some people who are as stuck as I was :-)

Hi HKoehn,

Normally, when we see this type of error message, though it may not seem like a network problem, it actually is. Access depends on a stable network connection and when that connection is interrupted in any way, it will display this type of message. A common symptom we see when Access displays this error is when you look at your mapped network drives on the machine, they will show as disconnected. My recommendation would be to have the user look at their mapped network drive as soon as this error message is displayed and see if they are showing as disconnected.

I would assume the next question would be why is it only happening on your Windows 7 machines? Unfortunately, networking is not my specialty, but it seems like a lot of times this problem does occur with newer operating systems and SMB 2.0 traffic / settings. I have seen several different steps used by our networking and platforms teams to fix issues with mapped network drives disconnecting and it appears one of the fixes they try (besides updating NIC cards) is installing the hotfix(s) in KB 982860. Though it doesn’t list the exact symptoms you are experiencing, it appears it does update some files and SMB settings. If you have a test environment that you can reproduce the issue on, it may be worth trying to test this fix. If you need more information about the fix and / or the impacts it will have, then you may want to consider opening up a support ticket with Microsoft so they can look at your exact issue and discuss the impacts of this fix. But once again, I would first verify that your mapped network drives are showing as disconnected immediately after you see the error message.

982860           A computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 takes four minutes to open a Microsoft Office 2003 document from a network share

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;982860

Best Regards,

Nathan Ost

Microsoft Online Community Support

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