Ever since me (and my mother) upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11, I have had strange issues with my SMB shares. For example, I cannot load any video or audio files directly off of the share UNLESS its through Windows Media Player, and only after it takes about 10-20 seconds to load. Using VLC, MPC-BE/HC, all causes them to immediately open and then crash. Except with VLC, where if I open it beforehand and drag the file over to the player, it will work (but only for shorter, smaller files)
I have also noticed that if I attempt to open a picture file from the SMB share, windows picture viewer crashes and takes the entire explorer.exe process with it.
This behaviour has been beyond annoying to me and I can't seem to find anyone else running into these issues. I thought it was just because I have a weird 40GbE direct connection over fibre to my PC, but that wouldn't explain the similar issues my mother ran into, and doesn't explain the fact that the same issues crop up using plain old gigabit ethernet.