Thank you for that reply, RangerHawk ... sorry for my delay but I was watching "footie on the tele"

Ok ... I'll start from scratch and rebuild.
I just hope I do it without mistakes because I seem to remember a few quirks regarding extra programs I needed to install during my manual setup ... hopefully the various mod instructions will keep me on the right path.

I'd still like to use my save when I restart ... do I just move it to a different location before I uninstall the game?? ... oh, and where is it?

And finally ... when I started playing this game a few months ago my friends on the server said it was best to go for manual install because of problems with Vortex.
I asked on their Discord about this and received this reply ...

"I don't know if it got fixed or not. Basically what it was doing was acting like NMM where it would not properly remove mod added files, and it would also randomly add mod files as well. I can look into it more if you want though"

I'm presuming that those problems are ok now as I couldn't see anything on the main forum about this.