Soulseek in Win10 VM hit and miss

Never bothered with VMs in truenas and KVM in general so this is all somewhat foreign to me, besides the basic concepts.
I just set up a windows 10 21h2 ltsc vm with display, hdd, and bridge nic devices with the intent to use it for slsk and torrents and such rather than let my laptop sit running 24/7. everything works, I can access my smb shares, go on the internet, download stuff, update… it’s all fine and dandy, but windows for whatever reason just doesn’t think it has an internet connection as the tray icon shows and it says in settings. I’ve tried setting the nic as mt1000 and virtio (after installing drivers) and also putting it straight on the adapter rather than the bridge and it’s the same deal for all combinations, it doesn’t think it’s online when it is.
I’m not sure but I’m guessing whatever is causing this problem is also causing issues with soulseek (nicotine+), as about half of the users I try to download from or read their shares end up with a connection timeout. I don’t have this issue when running on any other windows machine using nicotine+ on my network for the same exact users and downloads.
any ideas on what’s going on here?

unrelated side question: how does one make their signature collapsible so mine doesn’t take up half the screen?

[details="See My freeNAS system"]
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In regards to the signature.

For Windows VM not recognizing it is connected to internet; did you install redhat drivers? NVM - I see you said you installed network drivers. Other stupid things I can think of - are time/date settings correct? Do you have DNS setup on TrueNAS & the VM?

thanks for the signature tip. yeah date and time is good, I don’t get ssl errors or anything like that when browsing so that shouldn’t be a problem. also made sure the firewall rules for nicotine+ are good as well as admin permissions/uac, all of the basic checklist items I can think of. dns in windows ans truenas are good and I have them just continue the auto-discover chain that leads back to the modem for whatever the isp is using which has never caused me issues. what makes it even more puzzling is that apparently it sometimes works, some of the user/downloads that were timing out have downloaded (it auto retries every few minutes) even though right now they are back to connection timeout. very strange.