Office 2003 On Windows 7 - Disconnected Mapped Drives?

Windows 7 Prof 32 bit, with Office 2003 SP3 on a Dell laptop. Everything works fine when on the network and connected. If the user takes the laptop offsite without shutting it down first and still has mapped drives when he tries to save a document the drop down menu will hang any Office app.To explain a bit more... in the Save As dialog box, the drop down menu to change locations it was freezes it up. After about 30 seconds or so the menu will finally appear and the application will be happy again. The user doesn't have that kind of patience though.This isn't a new issue, I've found its due to the mapped network drives being unreachable. I do not have this problem in XP, only Windows 7. This is very annoying to the user. Short of removing the mapped drives with a script that the users has to run when they leave the office what can I do? I've looked around the web a lot and can't find much more than "disconnect the mapped drives" and I dont think of that as a solution so much as a work around.

The user is the CEO of the company I work for and he often uses his laptop at home, then gets in the car and uses it on his way to the office (obviously he isn't driving himself) and then gets into the office and wants his drives to just magically workAlso, trying to change how he uses the laptop won't work either. This is not a tech savvy user. This user also resist change (obviously, still using Office 2003)