Hardy becomes sluggish when a mounted drive becomes unavailable-How should I handle this

[John Toliver]

I have my laptop which is running the latest version of Hardy.  I
connect to my XP server which, among other functions is a file server.
I share a 120GB HDD from the server to my laptop and this is how I
handle backups downloads etc.

I connect to the root of the shared drive with "sudo mount -t
cifs //myserver/mysharedHDD /media/network/nameofserver"

This has been working rather nicely for me except that my file server
freezes up and becomes unresponsive at times.  When this happens, if my
laptop is still has the share mounted, all operations will slow down to
a crawl.  It took a while to figure out but what I do, when I know I'm
about to leave my home network is to dismount the drive manually using
"umount".

The problem is when the server freezes unexpectedly.  Hardy still thinks
the share is available and system performance is degraded.  It takes
forever to bring up the main program menu, or for any program to load
for example.

I tried dismounting the drive before I wrote this email and terminal
returned that the drive was busy and couldn't be dismounted.

1. How do I recover when the share becomes unavailable?

2. Is their a version of mount that can connect to a DFS root, so that I
can mount ALL shared drives on a machine instead of one of them by
typing "sudo mount -t cifs //%servername%"

I've discovered the key to success is to never give up.  You either
learn the right way, or you run out of ways to do it wrong.  A win/win
situation!