Mac Studio no longer reopens finder windows on external drives when restarting

The last few times I have restarted the Mac Studio from the Apple menu, upon restart and login, it will reopen any open Finder windows on the boot drive, as expected, but it no longer reopens any open finder windows that are on external drives, like it used to. And any minimized windows it does reopen are no longer minimized, but opened fully. This is really frustrating as I usually am working on images and things on an external drive, and it is a pain to have to reopen 5-10 finder windows manually each restart. And then have to minimize other windows I am not currently using, but want easy access to, also adds time & extra work!

All external drives are connected via Thunderbolt, and the drives are left running 24/7. With previous versions of the Sonoma, and older macOS going back for years, upon restarting the Mac Studio (and the iMac and all Macs before it), any and all open Finder windows would be reopened, returned to the previous state, upon a normal restart.

2023 Mac Studio, running Sonoma, 14.6.1.

Not sure what changed, or when, but it seems like this should not be happening. Thanks.

And yes, someone will say just update to Sequoia, that will solve all your problems…which I will do once I can confirm some programs I need to use right now will run under it.