I lost access to the shares on my WD NAS after the KB5065426 update. I followed the usual advice to uninstall the update, but I failed to block its reinstallation, and now Win 11 will not allow me to uninstall it. So, here is what I did to regain access to my NAS shares, while leaving the KB5065426 update installed. (Leaving it installed is presumably better for security anyway.)
Step 1: Insure that the NAS utilizes SMB2 or SMB3, and not SMB1. Do this by checking the settings on the NAS or its documentation.
Step 2: Run powershell as an administrator and enter the command
Get -SMBClientConfiguration
Look at the results to ensure that "EnableInsecureGuestLogons" is set to "$true" and that "RequireSecuritySignature" is set to "$false". If needed, change these values, by entering the command
Set -SMBClientConfiguration -EnableInsecureGuestLogons $true
and the command
Set -SMBClientConfiguration -RequireSecuritySignature $false
Restart the machine if any settings were changed by powershell.
Step 3: If you don't know the exact name by which your NAS is known to your machine, find it by looking under "Network" in Windows Explorer. Then, in Explorer right click on "This PC" to choose "Add a network location". Then click on "Choose a custom network location" to bring up a dialog where you can enter the exact name and location of the share you want to access, in the form
\exact name of your NAS\exact name of the share
Then, click "browse". That should bring up a system response in which it acknowledges that it has found the share. Assign a drive letter to it. You should now have stable access to the share, using the assigned drive letter.
At least this worked for me on my personal machine. On my corporate laptop it did not work, since my organization does not allow me to choose a custom network location outside of the corporate network, and my NAS is not in the corporate network. So, for access to my NAS on my corporate machine, I have to set up cloud access to the NAS and get access to the share by browsing from the cloud.
Yes, this is all annoying and time-consuming. I'm grateful to others on this thread for their help. Probably my strategy will not work for everyone, since there are lots of variables in play here. MS should not have released an update that would cause so much trouble with networking.