haha... fortunately i'm a bit more experienced than that...

i had literally just done a shortcut on this part of the configuration and it wasn't set up to use the proper OS application data directory scheme

so i just had to revise the appdata library, so it conforms to XDG, and then fiddle with my configuration so i'd moved all the files and pointed all the configs in the right place

thanks for your advising on this, this is definitely better