Hello,
After my original post, I waited for an answer and since I got none I decided to contact WD Support directly. I have to admit that whenever I contact WD Support I always receive the attention a customer expects from a company.
So the news is this: IP Address 239.255.255.290 port 1900 is a broadcast address where all Universal Plug and Play devices send signals and wait for another UPnP device to respond. This transmittion almost always is blocked by DSL routers and ISP providers, so it never reaches the internet. I searched the internet regarding this issue and found out that on some computers the application that broadcasts this signal is ‘Windows Explorer’, on others ‘Internet Explorer’, etc. etc.
SOLUTION: Steve Gibson of Gibson Research has developed and offers for free a utility ( http://www.grc.com/unpnp/unpnp.htm) that enables/disables the Windows Services that control the UPnP status. I downloaded it, disabled UPnP and all traffic to 239.255.255.290 port 1900, stopped.
Regarding the other issue that WD Smartware tries to access the internet, there is nothing wrong with that as the software needs to access the internet in order to find out if there are any updates available. No other data is transmitted to or received from through this communication and from what I have seen this connection is attempted only once; specifically whenever I start my computer. In my case the IP Address WD Smartware is trying to contact is 129.253.170.35:HTTP. Although I have not granted WD Smartware the right to contact this address at will, whenever my firewall informs me that Smartware tries to contact this address, I always allow it.
I hope that the above will help you decide on how to configure your environment.
Regards,
John
