I don't necessarily have an issue with the strategy I've employed, but it seems Windows isn't doing the right thing here. An issue I thought was likely specific to his machine and possibly related to the other problem I described last month in another thread (USB drives will not appear within that machine's network shares when browsing the network).

I don't recall this issue in the past with my own machine and using lower letters for mapped network drives. When I purposefully add network mappings to Windows, I normally set them to higher letters and try for some meaning/relation to their contents. In this instance I had set the drive to "F" to try and minimize any trouble locating some files which were previously referenced locally on "F"