difficulty with Samba (different behaviour on different machines)

Home LAN, WiFi, all machines are DHCP

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on both machines both have Samba version 4.15.13-Ubuntu. However something must be different because both my Tablet and my TV see the folders differently

My intention is to enable media to be accessed by VLCPlayer on my AndroidTV from a shared folder on my laptop.

There was a folder already on my machine called Public so I put things in there.

This works fine on one machine but does not on the other. One machine just allows the folder to be seen by VLC on either tablet or TV, the other shows the folder but if you attempt to open it you are required to log on ... I've tried every angle I know on logging on (don't even know for sure what it thinks the domain is) but it never allows a log on.

I started looking at samba and smb.conf for answers but it seems that none of this is in there ... there is some sort of GUI in use which I have no idea where it puts its "state information"

Both machines visually appear to have the same settings in the GUI (such as in the Sharing and the right click properties on the folders)

Help appreciated.