Issue resolved - for the primary issue I had moved to an ASUS ROG mother board which came with Ram DISK III and GameVI (crap)lets, and after disabling these, the subject issue stopped.
I also learned that when packaging with Gradle. if the file path includes the word “build”, it will break the batch file ‘Build’ word path bug, this kicked me in the butt because I was using GITLAB CI/CD which defaults to a subfolder named build which was causing my pipeline to fail. After overriding the path in the TOML file so that the project directory does not contain the word build (or builds, etc.) project compiles via CMD. Hopefully I can save at least one person the amount of pain and stress I experienced learning the above lessons.