Following up on this situation: I switched from Thunar to Dolphin as my default file manager and the problem went away. I can only surmise that this was a Thunar problem, not a Winux system issue.
After one of the recent updates, my otherwise quite useful Winux system has been unable to access my local Windows shares. Previously, shortcuts to "smb://<ip address="">/<share>" worked just fine. I have a number of shortcuts on the desktop that accessed shares on my NAS and other systems on my lan. After a recent Winux update (I'm not sure exactly when), they all are failing with the following error. "the file or folder smb://<ip address="">/<share> does not exist". I compared the smb.conf files...