Textures not showing up over render farm

[BKE]

Some have reported having textures not show up over their render farm. One possible cause proposed is that Microsoft sometimes limits the number of simultaneous accesses to a file in certain network environments. ( ie, a network that would be made up of completely Windows 7 machines, and not Windows Server.) That being said, despite my research - I am unable to find out what the maximum number of simultaneous file accesses a Windows 7 64 bit network can have.
Another cause reported is that the distributed rendering does not like mapped drives. (Map all nodes to the x:/ drive on the main wworkstation.)
Most suggest using the network path to your textures even in the workstation, so that all machines look to the same network locale.
As an alternative, I am considering using Goodsync to synchronize the textures across my small network. That way, each computer would simply access the textures from its own hard drive. Goodsync 9 has almost instant syncing of average sized folders. Is there any holes in this idea? (Goodsync is a great software. I already use it to keep redundancy between my laptop & desktop work directory.)
Thanks.

[samuel_bubat]

If you haven´t allready done it. Turn of User Account control on all the slaves.
In windows... "Start" type into the execute box uac. This will bring up the user account control panel
Turn the slider down and see if it works.

[BKE]

Thanks, Samuel. I am good with UAC, but I did not know that shortcut to access it.
What method do you use for mapping your textures over the network? Any snags?
Thanks again.

[samuel_bubat]

We have mapped network drives and it works without a problem. Make sure the texture path are set correct in the asset tracking.
In asset tracking a texture path would look like this R:\project\maps\.. so no "\\servername\project\maps.
also I never ran into problems with to many textures. In previous versions (I think it was fixed but don´t quote me on that)
3dsmax would just skip some textures when you have an extremly heavy scene. The only problem we ran into was the UAC thing
wich prevented textures from rendering with DR. I would check all the basics first (what you probably allready have done). Like
are all the network path available from the slaves. We had a router once that wouldn´t find any path unless you openend an explorer
and manually clicked on a mapped drive. Try a dummy scene and see if it works there... to make sure it´s not a scene problem.

[BKE]

Excellent, Samuel, thanks for helping me eliminate some possibilities!

[Morbid Angel]

if your drive mapping is correct, it should not matter weather its \\server\ or X:\, what can be wrong is if the X: is pointing to a wrong location. There is a couple of ways you can test this, I would simply see if the machine can read a single file from network, if yes then go on try texture from that location and so on.

[BKE]

if your drive mapping is correct, it should not matter weather its \\server\ or X:\, what can be wrong is if the X: is pointing to a wrong location. There is a couple of ways you can test this, I would simply see if the machine can read a single file from network, if yes then go on try texture from that location and so on.

Thanks, Dmitry. It is good to know that "X:\" is not a cause of issues. I appreciate the help!

[BKE]

if your drive mapping is correct, it should not matter weather its \\server\ or X:\, what can be wrong is if the X: is pointing to a wrong location. There is a couple of ways you can test this, I would simply see if the machine can read a single file from network, if yes then go on try texture from that location and so on.

Thanks, Dmitry. It is good to know that "X:\" is not a cause of issues. I appreciate the help!