Hello Sam,
Just to confirm, did you sign out of the account you want to rename the profile for, and enable and sign in to the built-in "Administrator" account to use to rename the other account's profile folder?
Enable or Disable Elevated Administrator account in Windows 10
Change Name of User Profile Folder in Windows 10
As I said previously I tried to change user folder samfl (user sam) to sam logged in as sam1(admin) or the W10 supplied Administrator from file explorer, admin command prompt and powershell admin. I got either file open in ..... or access denied. This morning I remembered a free utility I had on another W10 PC that I had downloaded when I couldn't delete a file on that PC.
It is called Lockhunter, it has not always worked but this time it did. Lockhunter adds an item to the right click menu in file explorer (what is locking this file). Lockhunter showed 2 applications. File explorer of course because I had right clicked on it and ....... Windows Media Player ?????????????? Huh????? I had NEVER opened media player on this PC. Fresh install so I'm sure of that!
Clicking on the unlock icon allowed me to finally rename samfl to sam ....... whew! When I logged in as "sam" the samfl folder stayed as "sam" so problem solved. However as you might expect my desktop did not have items I had previously installed as sam.
mklnk /d "C:\Users\samfl" C:\Users\sam fixed that .... a few things left that I think I can handle.
I Renamed the PC from powershell .... Rename-Computer -NewName "W10_MC" This was better than other methods I saw ...
1.) Still have to fix one drive folder as described
2.) My router is not showing up in file explorer Network .... I will work on that next. Anyway, thanks so much to everyone that tried to help, problem solved, on to other things
Making such changes from 'outside' Windows (Windows not running) as I suggested avoids everything- process locks, permissions.. the lot.
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