Windows Services and Network Drives

Rather than turn this into a Windows rant (which it easily could become), I'll just skip to the punchline. After a few hours of trying to figure out why my File.exists() and File.isDirectory() calls don't work, now that I've moved the code into Tomcat, running as a service on Windows 2003 Server, I discovered that network drives are not available to services.

More specifically, I got the impression that network drives are mapped by a user for that user, and as such, a service, which doesn't have a user (?), doesn't get the drives that any (other) user specifies. More generally, it's another way that Windows is borken. (Oops, I wasn't going to rant.)

So I got to go back to my client and get him to move the app (whose data I was getting over their net) to the local machine, or figure out how to at least push the files to the local machine. Feh. (rant, rant, rant...)