home network shares invisible after upgrading from win10 to win11.

I have systems A and B on my home network, they each have folders shared with the other. i upgraded them to win11 and everything is working except now they cannot share folders. I did a few hours of troubleshooting with chatgpt and copilot but it seemed like it was just throwing ideas at the wall, nothing worked. So I asked it to summarize my case so I could post about it here for some human input, here is its summary. Any advice is welcome, thanks.

SMB auth failure between two Win11 LAN hosts​

Two Win11 PCs (same HOME workgroup, 192.168.50.x) can ping and see each other normally, but SMB auth always fails.

What Works​

• Ping both directions OK
• nbtstat -A resolves names + MAC correctly
• net view \\localhost works on both machines
• SMB2 enabled, SMB1 disabled
• Shares exist and are visible locally

What Fails

• \\host\share and \\ip\share → ask for password then say its the wrong password
• net use \\host\IPC$ /user:Dad → error 1326

Logs

• Event ID 4625
• Logon Type 3
• NTLM (NtLmSsp)
• Status: 0xC000006A (bad password)

Notes

• Accounts exist locally on both machines (“Dad”, admin)
• NetBIOS and name resolution confirmed working
• Firewall ruled out
• Issue isolated to NTLM SMB authentication only

Do you have
1
a network problem
or
2 the common File explorer problem of shares not being displayed in its Network section?

Try entering the target computer & folder address in the File explorer address bar e.g.
\\TargetComputerName\SharedFolderName
If this works then you do not have a network problem.

This is how I set up & check my network:-
A consolidated network setup checklist for Windows 10 and 11 - my post #4 - TenForums


Denis

Try3 said:

Try entering the target computer & folder address in the File explorer address bar e.g.
\\TargetComputerName\SharedFolderName
If this works then you do not have a network problem.

Click to expand...

if i type \\targetcomputer\sharedfolder in explorer it brings up the "Enter Network Credentials" dialogue. I put in my account name and password and it replies in yellow "The specified network password is not correct" even though it is correct

Are either of these machines a clone of the other?

johnhoh said:

if i type \\targetcomputer\sharedfolder in explorer it brings up the "Enter Network Credentials" dialogue. I put in my account name and password and it replies in yellow "The specified network password is not correct" even though it is correct

Click to expand...

Are you logged in to your system via a PIN (MS account) or is your account strictly local?
if PIN is used, you need to use MicrosoftAccount/[email protected] as a user.

HTA - yes they started as win10 clones of each other then upgraded to w11 separately. OAT - local login only