OK, so I've had to migrate from OpenElec to LibreElec because OE is now dead to the point where stuff is broken and doesn't get fixed. I was a little apprehensive, because my previous experience with LE on my RPi3 was a just a sequence of crashes which made me decide to go back to OE. But this time was different, and a simple manual update did the trick, as painlessly as advertised.
There's just one thing: After the migration I can't get into Kodi's Samba shares any more from my XP machine. When I do a 'net view' on the XP box I get a "system error 71" Yes, I know, XP is ancient history, but for a variety of reasons (starting with the fact that I'm in Africa, using hardware so old that the serial numbers are in Roman numerals) that's what I've got.
Is this because LE 8.2.1 runs a Samba version which won't play nicely with XP any more, or is it because XP is confused because \\Openelec\sharename is now suddenly \\Libreelec\sharename and needs some massaging before it will see the new configuration?
I have no other machines (neither Windows nor Linux based) on my network.
This is merely annoying and not a big disaster if it turns out to be unfixable; I can always use SFTP as a work-around. Still it would be nice if this were easily fixable (read: short of upgrading my woefully outdated XP to something less archeological). 
All feedback appreciated!!