Cant connect to WIndows Workgroup / shared drives

[Patchy92]

Hi,
I need help. i have been researching via google to no avail and i hope someone here can help..

I have a brand new RPi 3B+, installed with latest version of Rasbian and Kodi 17.6...
I have it connected to my local network by both Ethernet and wireless.
I can access the internet no problem at all but i can not see / connect to my windows workgroup shared files..
When browsing for shares via Kodi I can see the computers (containing the shared drives) on the network but it keeps returning an 'invalid argument' error when i try to connect to one..

Whats confusing is that I have 4 other RPi 3 B all connected to the network (albeit running older versions of Kodi) and am not having any problem at all seeing and connecting to computers / share drives.
The share drives are on windows 7 machines - no home group established.
I do not have passwords set up on my shares. permissions are set to unrestricted for all users (always have been)
I have reset all devices, removed the older RPi from the network but it made no difference.. When I reconnected the older RPi they instantly connected to shares..
I can ping from the new RPi to all devices..

Not sure whats going on..
Any help would be appreciated


regards
Patchy

[LTolledo]

Welcome to the Forums!

have you installed the following packages on your RPi3B+?

a. samba
b. samba-common-bin

if not start installing those, then edit the /etc/samba/smb.conf file

oh before doing that, first better have a good read on setting up samba on RPi, so you understand what you need to do.

[DirkS]

a. samba

That's the smb server (https://packages.debian.org/stretch/samba). You don't need that to connect to smb / cifs shares on another computer.
You need smbclient.
Also no need to edit anything in the smb.conf file

[LTolledo]

Ok I'll take that correction.

I do install both as I always do 2-way test (RPi to Winpc, Winpc to RPi).

smbclient is also a package I always install after first update and upgrade after installation, as part of my favorite packages

[klricks]

I can get to my shares via filemanager --> [Go] --> [Network]