I'm running Windows 7 and have been using the Sidebar "Slideshow" gadget. I had it configured to pull pictures out of my
\\Server\Photos folder and subfolders. This has been working very nicely and it gives a beautiful rotating shuffled view of my photos that are there.
However, I also noticed after several weeks that my PC hadn't been going into sleep mode. After a lot of diagnosis (using powercfg -requests and powercfg -energy), I determined that my PC wasn't going to sleep because it found open files on the network.
Lo and behold, as soon as I turned off the sidebar gadget, it went to sleep the next time. However, is there a reason that the slideshow and WHS and Win7 interact in this way? Is there a way to have my cake (the pictures from the WHS server) and eat it (let the PC sleep) too? Anyone else seen this behavior?