ok
I got it working between my Win 10 and Win 11 machines
set up sharing on both machines in the standard ways
there's plenty of tutorials to show how to do that
most likely, if you're here, you've already done this half a dozen times
next, on your Win 10 machine, if you have ANY drives mapped currently to the Win 11 machine, working or not, disconnect them ALL
don't worry, this will be remedied soon
I know that disconnecting them all sounds like a radical move
I assure you, it's necessary
now comes the part that is confusing everyone
take note of the name of your Win 11 machine
- in my case, my Win 11 machine is called Greylien (it's an Alienware and I wanted to stick to the theme :P )
after disconnecting all shares if you had any to disconnect, open an explorer.exe window on your Win 10 machine
or even open the Networking window
you'll want an explorer window and NOT a command prompt
in the top of the window, in the location that shows what folder you are in, type this in but with your Win 11 computer's name \Greylien\
and hit enter
it will pop up a dialog about logging in
DO NOT log in here
look below for the option to log in using alternative credentials
you may have to click through a couple things to finally get there
make sure to check the box to allow it to use these login credentials from now on
HERE'S the trick: log in with your Microsoft account that you MUST be using on both machines (this is up in the air on whether this is 100% accurate, I don't have another machine that uses an alternate MS account to see if it would work that way. if anyone gives that a try, PLEASE let me know about it in a reply and I'll update these instructions)
after logging in with both your MS account login and password, you'll start seeing the shares coming from your Win 11 machine in an explorer window
you can now right-click map-network-drive
you can do this with all of the shares from the Win 11 machine
Now for the bad news
===============
this connection gets corrupted from time to time
in these cases, the quickest and easiest move is to get on your Win 10 machine and DISCONNECT ALL of your Mapped networks.
another bad bonus unknown: if you have mapped drives from another computer than just these 2 PCs, I have no idea if you might end up needing to disconnect from those mapped drives as well
I really hope not, but if it does have to go that way, just go back and repeat the instructions here
- now that you've disconnected all the shares, do the login with your MS account as described above
it'll take you a few minutes to get all your shares back up and running, but it will be worth it in the end
this whole nightmare pattern took me a good month of trial and error to completely figure out
I really hope it helps everyone else
If you have questions, please respond
if it worked for you, PRETTY PLEASE respond
I'm just one guy with a lot of time on his hands
so if you find a bug or a command I've shared is wrong, let me know so I can correct it
Good Luck to you all
edit: edited for clarity