Thanks, everyone, for all the help.
Virus Total also shows the files as clean, and it's great to have the reassurance that others have these files and there is some idea of where they came from....

Thanks for the reply. That's helpful and reassuring. At least one other person has these mysterious sub-folders and extra smaller .exe then.

We have two other Windows 10 laptops in the house, and...

Some optional background reading:
Back around 19th April I picked up a trojan.
I discovered it when a random Windows Defender scan showed zero threats, but that it had skipped some folders that...

I just turned on Controlled Folder Access on my Win 10 laptop last night.
Win 21H2 (build 19044.1645)

This evening I have two notifications that ATService.exe has been blocked from accessing...

I've been away from home for over a year now, and have been successfully using wake on lan to access my home pc. However, the router seems to have died now. I have a friend who's tried rebooting it...

;
Done, and what a difference! This chkdsk took about 33 minutes. The one on the old HDD was 4h45m.
Everything seems to be looking good. I'm currently just finishing off copying all my files back...

I tried this suggestion throughout the afternoon, but Macrium threw up another 23 error a couple of hours ago.


I will definitely ponder this.
Things have complicated slightly in that I got a...

Thanks for the replies thus far everyone.
It's looking more and more like I might have no choice but to do a clean install.

I've made two overnight test attempts to image onto a spare external...

Thanks for the advice. I'll give it a go with an image and see how it works.

This is the SSD I ordered......

My Toshiba MQ04ABF100 HDD has been horribly slow for a long time now. I've recently started to try and see why, and the HDD is often running at 100% according to Windows Task Manager. It's...

Yeah, it's definitely not worth that much effort :)
I'll monitor the thread to see if anyone comes up with something, but otherwise I'll live with it.
It's not the end of the world.
Thanks again!

Thanks again for going beyond, but that option of right-click > New Shares isn't available for me.

Right-clicking on Shares does nothing, and even left-clicking on More Actions only gives one...

Yeah, I'm strongly suspecting I broke something when I deleted the original user account that I set up when I first bought it.

I don't remember why I did it, but I created a second user account...

OK I'll try that, or even turning it off completely.
But I don't know that that would affect even the attempt to share a folder the way it is.

This is that completely useless error message I get...

I'm just stuck at the same point as I have been ever since the beginning.
Here's the message from another PC trying to access this laptop:
184678

I think it's a losing battle.
I was hoping it...

Progress, in as much as at least now I can access this laptop from this laptop over the network. Sort of...
I can now double-click on the laptop and see some sub-folders. Before I'd only get an...

Yes but that's where it doesn't work.
This is the security tab currently:

184675

But nothing can access this laptop. Something somewhere just isn't working the way it should
Edit: posted the...

I'm the only user on the laptop. It's the different look from other computers that's got me wondering if this is the problem.
My wife's laptop is an identical model to mine. Here's the Documents...

It's the same folder. Here's the corresponding General tab:

184671

Yes, I see this:
184670

It's just that the properties > general tab has the location looking the same on each computer
C:\Users\MyUsername
But the properties > sharing tab has the network location different from all the...

Yes, mine is identical to that.
If I expand the All Networks section at the bottom then I have Turn off public folder sharing, use 128 bit encryption, ant turn off password protected sharing.

You...

Password sharing is already off. I've also tried adding a rule to the firewall specifically allowing port 445 (this was a suggestion I found on some other site during the various searches I've tried)...

I've now created a folder directly on the laptop's C drive and named it 'Share'.
I've shared this folder and at least the laptop doesn't throw an error for that. But I still can't access this...

I'm unable to share folders on a laptop. From the laptop in question I can see and access shared folders on other machines on WiFi at home. But when on those other machines I can only see the laptop....