No luck with this either, but thanks for all your help, Matt.
I moved to the Mac from Windows 8, because the touch screen interface on a desktop machine seems misguided, and I am enjoying many aspects of the Mac interface, especially the way in which the trackpad interfaces with the OS; much better than a touch screen, in my opinion. However, I can't really believe that "the world's most advanced operating system" cannot map to a network drive more readily.
In Windows, I map to the network drive that I want to have available on a permanent basis through an exceptionally straightforward process, and it stays rock solid, only requiring to be remapped if I have to reboot the NAS or if I update the firmware of the NAS. The folders I want are one click away, and they open instantaneously. On the Mac, there is no easy equivalent; I have to manually reconnect to the NAS each time, through the finder, and then open the 'drives' I want to access after I have waited for the connection to be made. It is such a cack-handed approach, and it seems to cause a lot of people a lot of problems, judging by the huge number of posts devoted to the issue on many sites. Not only that, but I find that manually connecting to the NAS takes quite a lot of searching by the Mac for the NAS. There is no issue with the wireless signal, as I can access the web with no issues; it's just connecting to the QNAP NAS that's the issue.
Questions:
Why is mapping to a network drive such a problem on the Mac?
Is it the QNAP NAS which is the issue, rather that an inherent deficiency in Mac OS X? Can any other NAS setup provide a more intuitive and straightforward setup? Synology has been mentioned as more Mac-friendly.
Thanks for any help, as this is a frustration that I'm not sure I can continue to suffer.