I had an older program that in XP would see mapped network drives but in Windows 7 something is different and the old program wouldn’t recognize mapped drives. Now I’m more bald than when I began but I found a solution to the problem.
Vista and Win 7 have a dos command called mklink. This command can create a symbolic link to a folder.
mklink /d \MyDocs \Users\User1\Documents
Where /d creates a symbolic link
\MyDocsis the destination name of the link (which will have a folder icon)
and \Users\User1\Documents is the source (could be \\10.44.333.3\Folder\Folder2)
Once I set up one of these my problem program still wouldn’t entirely accept it but if I just typed in a little extra folder information in the box … well it took it right away!
mklink will also create hard links and directory junctions but those can be problematic in many ways, even mess up backup routines (I had a hard link which caused the Rsync backup routine to actually randomly delete files in the linked folder).