Having to Restart WebClient Service from CMD Line for WebDav location in SharePoint to work

This continues to baffle us.  A section of our users require the WebDav protocol to work when browsing to a SharePoint location.

For example on Run \\xyz.com\it\shared documents\

They expect it to open a the location and not prompt for user name and password and when it opens in Window Explorer they should see \\xyz.com\it\shared 

documents\ in the address bar rather than http://xyz.com/it/shared documents/ 

It turns out, users must first have the hostname of xyz.com set into IE's Intranet zone as the browser settings has influence over Windows Explorer when opening WebDav locations.

Then one must have the WebClient Service running in order for it to work properly else it tends to open in http: protocol.

Now here is what got us.  Sometimes even if WebDave service reports running.  It is necessary for some strange reason to restart it.

It is mainly either because the service has :

-Cached something based on the local admin's credentials therefore causing a prompt to appear.
-It has actually somehow not started properly because the service has a dependency on the MRXDAV services.

Therefore, what we must do is simply in the command line and run these 4 commands in the order below.  Has to be done on command line.

NET STOP WEBCLIENT 
NET STOP MRXDAV 
NET START WEBCLIENT 
NET START MRXDAV


Then try opening a location in the Run again and it should start to work.

This KONGED us for a while.

On a Win 7, Vista machine it seemed like the order for restarting the webclient has changed.

NET STOP MRXDAV  - This will then prompt WebClient to be stopped.  Click Y
NET START MRXDAV
NET START WEBCLIENT

Also, when we try to locate a WebDAV location that is in SharePoint, the prompt will continue to appear even if it is inserted into Intranet zone.  We found that we must have this registry key set and then restart WebClient for the authentication pass through to work.

See here

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941050/en-us

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters\AuthForwardServerList