Oh, as a follow up, apparently it's not possible to open up a network location without first mapping the drive in Windows. […] And the list of "Available Protocols" and "Prefix"es is blank.
It *might* be that there are extensions that are not packaged with Geany (like some GVFS handlers). If that's the case and the solution it identified, it could probably be distributed with Geany.
I'm sure there was a reason to remove the native file browser, but wow I really wish they hadn't done it.
The PR I linked mentions at least: * bugs in the implementation leading to Geany crashing sometimes * maintenance hassle (most Geany developers don't use Windows themselves, and as a consequence most hardly know the Windows-specific APIs for fixing weird bugs) * optimistic guess that as other platforms are happy with the GTK dialog, Windows users would as well. Maybe that wasn't true though.
If you feel it's a large enough regression to warrant it, we could possibly try and provide a [GtkFileChooserNative](https://docs.gtk.org/gtk3/class.FileChooserNative.html) alternative implementation. It has some restrictions on what Geany can adjust in it, but would probably be easy enough to implement that we could maintain it on the longer run -- and it's likely less buggy than what we had, as well as supporting other platform's native dialogs as well.