In a strange way, it's reassuring to know I'm not the only one having these kinds of problems!

Yes - don't navigate to 'Network > Shared Folders (SMB)' to begin with. Instead, just type the 'smb://hostname/share' URL into the location bar directly.

You can save the samba share paths to the Dolphin 'Places' panel for convenient future access.

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OK. Because one objective is to minimize the amount of typing in favor of pointing-and-clicking, this leads us to your next suggestion:

Thanks, I just tried that and the PC in question showed up over in the left panel, under Remote right below Network.

Now, if I do this for, say, six different Windows PCs then all of them will be shown permanently under Remote? The more PCs on the list, the more unwieldy the display becomes. Is there a way to categorize them so that they hide under a single catch-all listing (say, Remote) and then get displayed only when you click on this listing? I'm thinking of the way that the left-hand panel works in Windows Explorer (now called File Explorer), where all members of a category are neatly hidden under their respective category labels until you click on the category label, and then they pop down. For example, in Windows Explorer, the computers under Network won't necessarily be displayed until you click on the Network label and only then does the list show up over on the left, below "Network".

As an alternative approach, I looked for a way to have the PC show up only in the right-hand panel when I happen to click on Network. So I tried the "Add Network Folder" method with the same PC, and managed to get the PC listed over in the right-hand panel for Network. (However, by this method I'm still getting asked to open something called the 'kdewallet'. Is there a way to avoid having to deal with this every single time?)

Now, both of the methods above (getting the PC listed under Places or Remote, or getting the PC listed in Network) involve setting up a login for the PC. So the bottom line is indeed that from Kubuntu, in order to gain this kind of access to each Windows PC on the network, I would have to set up every PC with a login password, is that correct?

As an alternative you could create a desktop short cut to a share.

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Interesting idea, thanks. That text looks like it would be a section of an already existing configuration file? If so, which one?

In what program, and into what file, do I type those lines? I don't know what to do with the information you gave.

It is the entire contents of a shortcut i.e a text file that is created in your ~/Desktop directory.

Use any text editor to create the file and save it to your Desktop directory. Once created you can double click it and Dolphin will open with a tab accessing the desired share as illustrated above. You can even do something similar on the Windows desktop.

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OK, I tried that and there is a new folder icon in the Desktop folder, cool.

However, no new icon showed up on the desktop itself (isn't that what a desktop shortcut is supposed to do?) and I'm being asked for a password to open the kdewallet. How do I stop this request from recurring?

When you make it executable it will show up as an folder icon. When you click on the shortcut it will open up dolphin.

I'm not sure what is going on with kdewallet at the moment.

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Disable the kwallet subsystem as explained here...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...n-kde-plasma-5

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Great -- that worked, thank you!

All right, so here's what the situation is looking like from this angle:

1. From Kubuntu Linux, there are several ways to access a Windows shared folder (and the Kubuntu test laptop has all three methods for the same Windows PC) -- so long as one is willing to set up computers on the network with logins (username and password).

2. The bumps on the road presented by having username + password can be mitigated, though not wholly eliminated, by setting things such that passwords don't have to be entered each and every time (for example, bypassing manual sign-in on a Windows PC).

3. Access to Linux systems from Windows PCs seems inconsistent, for reasons that I don't entirely understand. Some Windows PCs can browse the Linux computers via Explorer, others remain unaware of their presence on the network.

4. As long as there is access in both directions, even if from different sets of computers, I can work around the limitations by (if necessary) copying files to an intermediate computer and then to its ultimate destination. This is currently still the case.

5. However, as we have learned, changes continue to be made to networking (e.g., with respect to SMBv1) and it's unclear at this point how many obstacles will eventually exist to free-and-easy networking from the Microsoft side as MS drops or modifies protocols and settings in Windows.

6. Therefore, I'm going to stop fiddling with this for the time being, waiting to see how things shake out with regard to MS and Windows networking. I'll be curious to see, for example, if it will remain possible to browse Kubuntu public folders without additional hoops to jump through. Any further tinkering right now seems to run the risk of becoming wasted effort as more changes come down the pipeline from Redmond.

So I want to offer my sincere gratitude to all who offered tips, information, and guidance as I tried to make my way through this thicket. Two Thumbs Up to all of you!