Why is my network messed up after update to windows 11 24H2

Just thought I’d close the loop on my experience, don’t know if it will help you. I already had SMB signing turned on on my NAS, so the stated problem fixes really didn’t apply. My win11 laptop upgraded fine, the NAS showed up normally. The desktop continued to show an error that “the specified drive already exists” when I tried to map a drive to the NAS. I ended up deleting all of the errors on the previous maps that quit working, and bingo, I was able to map at that point. I have two “NAS” devices, one a full blown Synology NAS, the other a simple cloud storage drive. The Synology drive was the last one to work with the above actions.

It's clear from the many posts in this thread that there are 2 possible problems being caused by Windows 11 update 24H2.

1. Network attached drives and computers are no longer visible in Windows file Explorer.
2. Windows errors when attempting to map network attached drives.

My own problem relates to that stated under Problem 1. Despite trying every suggested setting in this thread and other various posts on the Internet, nothing has helped to restore my ability to browse my NAS drives directly using Windows Explorer and SMB. Nothing, that is, other than rolling back to Windows 11 23H2!! It would be most helpful if someone from Microsoft joined this discussion and confirmed that they are aware of both of these problems and are working towards a proper solution.

how about fix the update, this kept me out of my file server for almost a full day until I uninstalled update, fixed. I've got all updates stopped until you guys fix this, there's too many computers to change just because you guys screwed up.

I have this exact same problem, wondering if you could tell me how to get to these settings, as I'm not as proficient at this stuff as I used to be :-) I can see my NAS from my upgraded PC, but I can't get any of my Network Drives to work. I can see my NAS settings if I log into it. This is really a bad look for Microsoft, my goodness.

The first step to troubleshooting your problem is to ignore whatever Norton is saying and remove that junk from your computer. It's completely unnecessary and will only complicate network-related issues as it tries to maintain arbitrary control of your computer, while doing little more than hogging system resources that could better be utilized elsewhere.

Norton randomly blocking and unblocking computer connections is a symptom of the Norton software, not Windows, and just further reason to avoid using the software entirely. It's pointless to try to troubleshoot a Windows problem when you've simultaneously got separate issues created by running the Norton software.