determining a network drive is disconnected[RESOLVED]

[pgmrdlm]

The application that I am working on is used to monitor specifric folders on a file server that is part of my home network. It looks at mounted shares for activity. Is there a way to determine that a share is not mounted???? Say a network problem occurs????
Second question.....
Currently I have shell scripts running on the remote machine that create a file when activity has occured. And my vb application looks for that file to notify me of the activity. If I wanted the vb program to do all the work. Would I errrrrr, do a directory list into an array with the time stamps of the files to be used in a compare against a last activity time that I have saved in a file?? Can I do that.... errrr, how would I populate the array with the directory listing and time stamps so that I could do my compares against it???

Dan
p.s. Ya know, the more I look at these questions the dumber I feel.