I'm having an issue with Windows 7 Ultimate apparently redirecting SMB traffic to HTTPS; I can no longer connect to a ReadyNAS NAS device because it expects SMB traffic. Using Wire Shark I can see that my system is generating traffic to the NAS, but it is HTTPS requests instead of SMB. The ReadyNAS tech support folks confirmed that it should be using SMB and that HTTPS will cause a failure, but after poking a round in the registry we can't find what may be causing the issue. I suspect that VPN software may have caused the issue, but it has since been uninstalled. I believe the VPN software was from Juniper Networks, and before that Nortel, though I believe everything was fine with the Nortel VPN software. The company switched us to Juniper at some point, but I'm not sure of the timing. Has anyone else experienced this SMB -> HTTPS translation, or know where I could start looking?

I'm about to go to the extreme of reinstalling Windows to try and fix this issue, but wanted to try one more appeal for help first. Since the original post, I've tried purging all references to either Juniper of Nortel from the registry in case there was something of them still affecting the system, but obviously this didn't work. I've looked for any unknown services and processes to no avail. Neither VPN website has any forum traffic on the issue and I no longer have support for either, so I can't go to their tech support for help. I tried running a new Windows 7 installation inside Virtual PC to see if it had the same issues, but that installation did NOT have the same issue as my everyday system, so that seems to narrow it down to configuration issue with the system. Any suggestions would certainly be appreciated. I've had the system for almost 4 years, and it would not be trivial to reinstall and get everything back to the current state.

I reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch and the problem went away. I have no idea what the root issue was.