well that's also interesting, but I mainly experience this problem on my desktop. there was a plasma version when even the taskbar panel got frozen, and the kde file manager, double commander too for like a minute, every time they try to do anything with an unreachable network drive. and its even worse on my laptop so there I just don't mount my shares anymore.

I have been wondering how does windows do it, and programs made for windows, because this is a nonissue there (though windows has its fair share of problems with network shares though..). maybe they just learned to do all IO ops on a different thread..