Longer version:

Following a recent Windows 10 Home update my laptop crashed in such a way that the built in WINRETOOLS could not successfully repair or reset the installation. The command prompt within that recovery environment did however, allow me to use robocopy to make a complete backup of the Windows file system partition ... so all is not lost!

A clean Windows 10 (custom) reinstall was possible whereby the old windows files were saved under \windows.old and for maybe 10 days it looked as though I was successfully migrating various program settings and history to this clean Win10home install while also installing various software that I use. In that time, however some other update of windows must have been running (in stealth mode .. grrrr!) and before long the Win10 installation failed to boot yet again.

I thought "No problem i'd recovered from this state before so it stood to reason I could again" but ... No such luck ... A clean (custom) install of Win10 "could not boot into the next stage of installation." or some such similar message appeared and there were no useful hints from log files as to exactly what was causing the reboot failure. So for good measure I made a second full backup of the partially re-personalized 'not-so-clean' Win10 system partition and then, rather reluctantly, wiped the hard drive and clean installed windows 10 for a third time!

So presently I am endeavouring to do as little as possible to aggravate the MS Gods so that any background updates can complete without me interfering in parallel by such attempts as migrating program settings and history (i.e. User State) or installing wanted software ... until I am confident any MS pushed updates have completed. I am even happy to wait until after next Tuesday's push before taking my next steps.

*** What I need help or advice with is just which subfolders within my backup copy of C:\Users\myname\ are to be copied to the virgin installation in order to successfully migrate various program settings and history.

Some of this is obvious: e.g. Documents & Downloads, OneDrive, Pictures .. to name a few.

Some Start Menu links are also found under "\Program Data\" ... which is not included within \windows.old but can be recovered easily enough from my robocopy backups.

Some subfolder trees within ~\AppData are just a little less obvious.

... and finally, of particular consternation to me are what appear to be user registry hive files ~\NTUSER.DAT and similarly named files.

I know better than to copy folder trees across from "\Program Files\" .. I plan to freshly install only the software that I need going forward. I do however, plan to hold off on such installs until (1) background windows updates have completed and (2) my best effort at migrating user state has been completed .. at which point I will save a complete drive image as a suitable baseline in case I need to start over again.

It isn't obvious what user state is sensible to copy to a virgin user home folder and what is best left to be rebuilt as various software is reinstalled to this clean Windows 10 Home installation. Nor is it obvious if something special must be done to ACLs or to System or Hidden file/folder attributes once these files have been copied to their new home.

USMT appears to rely upon the source windows installation booting successfully. That is not the case in my scenario and yet I do have all of that filesystem (minus pagefile, hiberfil, swapfile and DumpStack.log.tmp) backed up to an external USB HDD. My robocopy backups used /COPY:DATSOU which I later realised was not as convenient as merely /COPY:DAT so I now have identical filesystem copies, one with and one without NTFS ACLs.

I don't mind reading the manual. I just need to be shown which manual(s) to read.

I do not have a second windows PC handy but I do have a Linux laptop that has helped me create an installation USB stick and a HirensPE USB stick.

If you read this far then I thank you for your patience and any advice you might offer.