VMware Workstation, Ubuntu Host, Windows XP Guest: Automated Way to Map Network Drives

I was using Windows XP virtual machines (VMs) in VMware Workstation 7 on Ubuntu Linux.  I wanted to automate the process of mapping network drives.  I typically used the Map Network Drive technique in Windows Explorer for this purpose.  It appeared possible to automate this with a registry edit , but apparently a  more typical and robust approach was to use the "net use" command .

The net use command could be entered from the command line .  I was more interested in saving it in a batch file that I could apply to multiple network drives and could re-run anytime without having to remember or research the proper syntax. Microsoft seemed to say that, for my purposes, the command to map a network drive would look something like this:

net use d: "\\vmware-host\Shared Folders\DATA" /persistent:yes

where DATA was the name that I had given to the drive in Ubuntu.  This resulted in an entry in Windows Explorer that read, "Data on 'vmware-host\Shared Folders' (D:)."  I was not able, at this point, to automate the process of right-clicking and renaming that to be simply "DATA."

I combined several of those commands in a batch file.  A batch file was just a file created in Notepad, with one command on each line.  I also included a comment, in case I wanted to write an "undo" batch file.  The line just shown, made permanent and accompanied by that comment, looked like this:

net use d: "\\vmware-host\Shared Folders\DATA" /persistent:yes

; to disconnect, use this (I think):  net use d: "\\vmware-host\Shared Folders\DATA" /delete

I saved that batch file in the folder containing my various WinXP installation materials.  So then, for future installations, all I had to do was to double-click on that batch file in Windows Explorer, or start it from the command line or from another batch file, and my drive mapping would proceed automatically.