That's absolutely it. Nothing (no errors) in the CheckSur.LOG file, and the configuration screen now has stuff in it. WOW!
I have some very short questions: feel free to ignore them, or direct me to the fastest way to read up about all this and what you just did.
1. What exactly did you do? (this I expect to read about elsewhere on the site, including the SOURCE of the files that got copied - I failed to grasp Microsoft's explanation)
2. How (do you think, in a sentence or so) did I mess up the system? Or was it a side-effect of something Microsoft did, albeit with good intentions?
(The interesting thing to me is that just about everything worked perfectly for the last couple of months, for the first time ever, except for the "windows programs and features" screen, and a couple of other things I didn't care about (RDP to my home stopped authentication when remote but was fine within the network, I couldn't view the contents my own shares from my own computer, which seemed odd, although other PCs could open them. And it didn't look good for restoring from backups. No need to analyse any of this, just a little background)
3. Is there any routine maintenance that your review of my files indicates I might not be taking that you would recommend? I'm not a fan of AV/Defender, but pretty good at tweaking the firewall directly.
Thank you a zillion times, I will be making a donation.
Stephen