A reddit user, seckatary, posted a solution which, after some tweaking, ultimately helped me get VLC rendering WMV files again in Windows 11. (Their suggestion is at https://www.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/17p9f3w/comment/kbnricq/ .) The fix that worked for me was to disable Hardware Decoding under FF...
0.8.6i version shows 0.8.6g in the vlc.exe properties. This would be trivial except that the version information is used by Secunia PSI (and possibley other security scanners) to flag executable's with security advisories.