Ideally, this happens in a separate thread that can be aborted quickly if it doesn't finish before closing the file browser or Blender.

@Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) : Ideally, this happens in a separate thread

Yes, might play with that when I have time.

I'm mostly just not certain of the general need for this. I recall people complaining in the past that they didn't want to have to map a share to a drive letter just to use one, but not sure how great that need is. And for people who do map everything then these shares will be duplicates.

I am reasonably certain that performance of this wouldn't degrade as the network size increases. In a little peer-to-peer network, like we might have at home or small office, there isn't a central process keeping track of machines and resources and so are done with broadcasts and timeouts. So the time for this to complete is really just wait for timeouts, and that is just one per network type. On a proper domain-based network, device and resource discovery are different and much faster so it should be better. And the resulting list should be what you expect, since this is only looking for connectable shares. The function used will not return workstation hidden $ shares, for example.

So I'm assuming this patch will probably rot here until someone pipes in with a "Hey, I tested this on my large networks and we really need this!" LOL