Network Drive Disconnected

Hi, I wonder if one of you clever people could help me please?

I run an office with 6 PCs networked on a peer to peer basis. Mixture of
versions of Windows, but the problem is on the XP machines.

All of the machines are mapped to a drive letter - John's PC is J: on all
the other PCs for example. The problem I have is that the J drive stays
disconnected until there is some activity on it. So, it shows as 'Network
Drive Disconnected' in My Computer. It is easy enough to 'wake up' the
network connection just by clicking on the drive.

One of our users still uses Excel 5, and this cannot find the J drive until
it has been separately woken up. Is there any way to get Windows to wake up
ths connection automatically, please?

One work-around I was thinking about was to create a batch file just
containing 'J:' in it. Running this in a DOS box does in fact wake up the
connection. I was then thinking of scheduling this to run every so often.
However, this does not seem terribly elegant. Is there a better way of doing
this?

Thanks for any help

Geoff