After successfully accessing the network by booting in Safe mode, I rebooted normally and continued to encounter the same problem. What used to be hit or miss in making the connection is now at a 100% failure rate. Of the 10 or so boots/reboots in the past 2 days, I have not been able to access the network any time. Interestingly, even though I cannot connect to my networked drives, I don't get the icon and message stating that fact.
In Device Manager I checked the driver for the NIC and it said I have the most updated driver. I don't recall ever updating the driver so I don't know if I can "roll back" to a previous version.
I ran the Diagnostic Startup to no avail. I did, however, get the "Could not connect to all network drives" message and icon. Because nothing worked, I had to reset the startup to Normal, I then rebooted, then changed back to Selective Startup and I'm back to where I was before.
Any other suggestions? By the way, I'm still getting the "Generic Host Process" error message .............
Late Friday update -- decided to check my LAN properties and when I clicked on the Advanced tab I got the following:
"Windows cannot display the properties of this connection. The WMI information might be corrupted. To correct this, use System Restore." Unfortunately, I cannot run System Restore because at some point while troubleshooting this, I turned it off and (d'oh!) never turned it back on.