Blocked connections in LSM while using VPN

Yesterday, I noticed my router reporting that my Touch had 2 connections to my LAN. I was worried about hacking, so I reviewed my security tab in LMS advanced settings, and noticed the 'block incoming connections' setting was unchecked. After checking the box, and setting my desktop's IP as 'allowed', I saved and things were fine - until they weren't. After about a minute, I could no longer connect.

For the last 24 hours, I tried various solutions including: factory reset, clean install, allowing a range of IP's, allowing the special 127.0.0.1 IP, and nothing would make it work for more than a minute or so.

During this hair-pulling adventure I began to wonder about my VPN. It's set to ignore LAN interactions, but I've noticed strange behavior with my NAS connection at times - always very temporary, tho, so I never pursued it.

Long story short, I disabled my VPN and the problem disappeared. When I re-enabled it, the problem came back after about a minute or two - just like at the beginning of this mess. I'm not sure how, but my VPN IP must have been getting passed to the server when requesting the web control page and settings. Maybe it's related to squeezebox.com, I don't know. Perhaps someone can chime in.

So I've now fixed the problem by adding the LMS executables to the apps allowed to bypass the vpn via split tunneling. I'm using PIA with Wireguard.

Perhaps this will help someone in similar straits.
eCo