Hi Ivan, thanks for such a quick response and looking into it. I am reposting my deleted response as I thought I had it solved, but no, I haven’t. To answer your questions :
1: OS is Windows 10 Home version 21H1 x64 bit.
2: I though I found the issue, being another double space in the mapped folder (which doesn’t shown in the path with the network drive) All double spaces removed now, and thought this fixed it, but what really got it “working” again was opening the project folder using the UNC path with the double slashes. When I remapped it and used the network drive path again, it failed and would not build. It works with the UNC path, but the build times have blown way out and intellisense no longer works.
On side note, this double space error in the folder name created 2 sets of heavily nested folders under the project folder, and the would keep nesting until I assume it hit the character limit. It did this nesting outside of the project folder in multiple places as well. Very weird, first two subfolders in image below:
The folders keep nesting until they hit the character limit i guess, one of the paths below:
A:\100 PlatformIO projects\2020.02 HCL TTGO_COPIEDOUT\ Rob's Documents\100 PlatformIO projects\2020.02 HCL TTGO_COPIEDOUT\ Rob's Documents\100 PlatformIO projects\2020.02 HCL TTGO_COPIEDOUT\.pio\build\esp32dev
3: I tried Solution 2, but unfortunately, when i restart PlatformIO after copying over python and deleting the penv folder, it just reinstalls python first then the core.
So i suppose the problem persists. I like platformio too much to change IDE’s, so will try and keep copying back and forth between local drive and network storage where everything else is. I do hope python address this soon (and sorts out the double spaces in the path breaking things 
)
Thanks again!
Rob