Okay, that procedure made me really nervous. But, PCPiranha, YOU ROCK! My NAS now appears to have regained its sanity and prompts me for user name and password as it should. I'm a happy boy!
Just for future reference, I though I'd outline all the oddball things I did to my NAS that may (or may not) have lead up to this problem. Who knows, maybe this will be of some use to you, your firmware geeks, or others:
- After unboxing the unit and reading the documentation, I decided (perhaps foolishly) not to install any of the software that came on the LinkNavigator CD. It appeared to me it really wasn't necessary.
- I assigned a hostname of "NAS-1", set my time zone to "GMT-04:00", and enabled NTP (pointing it to time.nist.gov for a weekly update).
- I disabled DHCP and assigned a fixed IP address of "192.168.1.11".
- I assigned the workgroup name "WESTERNTRAIL".
- I configured the unit for RAID1 operation.
- I added several users and shares.
- I deleted the "share" share. (This may have been a bad idea. Later, after I began having problems and attempted to install the software on the LinkNavigator CD it failed, perhaps due to this share being gone.)
After that, the unit ran fine for a week or more before giving me the problem that led me here.
Again, thank you so much for your help and patience. I'm off to play with my newly resurrected NAS...