Workaround for: When you mount network drives or use SMB with CIFS, Windows Service acts differently than a user mapped drive

Issue

When you mount network drives or use SMB with CIFS the windows service acts differently than a user mapped drive.

Workaround

1. Open an elevated cmd.exe prompt (Run as administrator):
2. Elevate again to root using PSExec.exe:
   1. Navigate to the folder containing SysinternalsSuite and execute the following command:
   psexec -i -s cmd.exe 
   2. You are now inside of a prompt that is:
   nt authority\system 
   3. Verify by typing:  
   whoami
   The -i is needed because drive mappings need to interact with the user.
3. Create the persistent mapped drive as the SYSTEM account with the following command
net use z: \\servername\sharedfolder /persistent:yes

See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/182750/map-a-network-drive-to-be-used-by-a-service