Mac OSX Connection Failed Accessing Windows 7 Shares - Memory Allocation Error

We had a customer who wanted an inexpensive way to serve shares to about 10 computers in their office, and we put in a high-end desktop with Windows 7 Pro.  The "Server" worked fine for this purpose for all of the XP and 7 computers in the office, but the owner had an iMac which would consistently connect to the SMB shares and act fine, and then disconnect and not show any computers available on the local network.

We tried everything from going from wireless to wired, to checking sharing access, but nothing would fix it - it was always temporary and the next day we'd get a call that he was disconnected again.  His error would conssitently say "Connection failed: The server 'xyz' may not exist or is unavailable at this time" and look like this:

Finally we came across this article entitled "Windows 7 Nonpaged Pool Srv Error 2017" located here: http://alan.lamielle.net/2009/09/03/windows-7-nonpaged-pool-srv-error-2017

Essentially, the article states that in certain situations when Linux/Unix-based computers are accessing Windows 7 shares (Macs are Unix based), Windows can run into memory allocation issues.

The author of the post noted in the Windows Event Viewer that there was an Error 2017 reflecting the following:

Source: srv
Event ID: 2017
Level: Error
The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.

We checked our Windows 7 "Server" and sure enough had tons of this exact error.

The solution below, suggested in that article, worked for our client and they are no longer calling us about this issue:

On the Windows 7 computer, set the following registry key to "1":

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache

and set the following registry key to "3":

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size

Reboot the Windows 7 sharing computer and the problem should be solved.

Hopefully this works for you!