Sorry for the length. As this is a solution I want it to be pretty thorough.
I did a full reinstall and resolved my issues. I don't know the root cause with 100% certainty, but believe it was a Windows File and Print sharing issue and the configuration on the Asus wasn't totally correct. I was using drive mapping but do not believe the Windows File Sharing was properly implemented.
I believe this was NOT a DPP issue at all. Now DPP, PPL and the EOS Utility and the EOS Lens Registration Tool all are working flawlessly. I went all the way from camera to print, adding lenses for registration, and everything works great. I stressed the system and the NAS by opening Lumar Neo, DPP and NX Studio all at one time. The NAS is moving at about 10MBs and slows to 2MBs ad responses are sluggish at times. I even edited one file in DPP from the private cloud. It wasn't great, but wasn't terrible either. This was all normal and to be expected.
I worked on the two laptops side by side to ensure consistency and compatibility. I did a full methodical rebuild of the ASUS, first fully updating the OS and the graphics drivers. I then installed DPP, etc. from Canon, and added in Chrome, and various software, ensuring DPP worked after every SW installation.
I'm not sure how important it was, but I also enabled SMB1 to ensure some of my older private cloud HW had all of the networking protocols that they might need to work properly.
I LOVE the new printer (Pro 1100). Canon has done a great job on that device, in terms of ease and print quality.
Some things of the many things that I learned along the way:
1) Ccleaner duplicates search does NOT work with mapped drives, but DOES work with fully shared files - this is one reason (among others) leading to my conclusions,
2) Microsoft PC Manager is worth downloading from the MS Store. It has many of the CCleaner "pay-for" (I bought a paid license) features for free and authored by MS,
3) I had way too many disorganized files, processes and such. I still do, but I'm working on that and will do more "clean as you go" as I learned in my restaurant management days of yore. Yes, I have backups of my backups, both networked versions and offline.
5) Things like this are almost always "pilot error". There was nothing wrong with the ASUS AMD HW, the OS, nor DPP. It was an ID10T error (joke from my IT days)
5) This is a GREAT forum with folks giving huge amounts of time and energy to help others. Thanks to all that offered advice along the way. I will mark this as a solution for anyone else who might have a similar problem, and add some HW details below.
Computer - ASUS ProArt PX13 was the problem computer. Second computer is an AlienWare X14 R2. Both running Windows 11 Home 25H2. WD My Cloud - 3 8TB devices running RAID 1 - two running remote backups and one primary - Linux based OS5 (current and supported version). Tested DPP 4.20.11 and 4.21.10 and both are working.
