Sorry about that much stuff, but i am not an expert and i really want to fix that problem. I do not have an idea why PM creates a new folder path and stores the renamed photos there. First i thought it occurs only in the arrangement view. But as you can see, it occurs also when renaming w/o arrangement view in the Navigator. Renaming in the Organizer is ok. But there you can not do arrangements.
I hope you experts will find the reason for that behavior of PM.
I think that rearranging photos has no ill effects. I think the problem is due to inconsistent application of path normalization. The first path normalization comes from when you pick the folder with the folder chooser dialog when you used Scan to Catalog. Later when you used the Navigator and renamed files, the paths to the changed files were not normalized, so the updates to the catalog caused the representation of the path to change. The paths to the photos are the same as far as the OS is concerned (they both can be followed to the same file) but clearly they're not all the same path components.
There are reasons for path normalization (following mount points, symbolic links, dealing with shortcuts, relative paths, etc.) but I think users expect that when they open a folder with an assigned drive letter, they will see that path throughout the application.
However, if the drive letter fails to be assigned for some reason, then the server path (the one you call IP Address) would still work as long as the server is still reachable.
Perhaps we should just expect that if the user has assigned a drive letter to a server share, then they will maintain that it exists and prefer them.
-Kirk