I don't know how other people deal with this issue, but I prefer to use Network Places instead of mapped drives in Windows Explorer, and I find it a pain that to get the “Add Network Place“ wizard, I have to hide the folder view to bring up the common tasks.
A (slight) shortcut is to invoke the “Add Network Place” wizard directly with the command line:
rundll32 netplwiz,AddNetPlaceRunDll
(Thanks to http://windowsxp.mvps.org/addnetwork.htm).
How do others dela with this issue?