Found out (finally) how to stop Windows 2000 from thinking its working offline when it can not see a non-existant server anymore. I’ve spent ages trying to delete the server from the offline-folder files (where it doesn’t even appear in the first place) and have finally found out that if you do a ctrl-shift and press the delete files button it clears ALL files from the offline folders and enables you to start again from scratch.
Still no idea why explorer crashes with an access denied message every second launch though 🙁