Nord Vpn Defaults Break SMB

I am beyond enraged. I had a different issue causing me to revert to one of my older Windows images. Everything was working fine until I realized I couldn’t see my SMB shares, which I use as a NAS. After messing around for hours with firewalls, NetBIOS, among other things, to no avail, I stumbled upon an article talking about an invisible LAN on NordVPN. Well, what do you know, even though it wasn’t running, it had this setting enabled, and it was blocking my SMB share.

Invisible Lan

So if you want to save yourself hours, check if NordVPN is installed on the computer and disable the setting to be invisible on the LAN.