I have added a drive letter to my steam drive and suddenly I can run the game again. No other changes were required except adding the drive letter in Windows. I'm not sure what changed between the various versions but whatever it was prevented the game from accessing the drive through normal Windows ...

0.001 Program arguments: "F:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\Factorio\bin\x64\Factorio.exe"
0.001 Config path: C:/Users/Gnuthad/AppData/Roaming/Factorio/config/config.ini
0.001 Read data path: //?/GLOBALROOT/Device/HarddiskVolume2/SteamApps/common/Factorio/data
0.001 Write data path: C:/Users ...

I have updated the game to version 1.1.74 and the error is still occurring in the same place. Here is the current log file:
0.000 2023-01-16 16:26:41; Factorio 1.1.74 (build 60256, win64, steam)
0.000 Operating system: Windows 7 Service Pack 1
0.001 Program arguments: "F:\Games\Steam\steamapps ...

Hi guys

Apologies if I have missed any information which could assist. Let me know what else I should supply and I will do so.

I haven't had a chance to play Factorio for a few months now. I attempted to run it today after updating to the most recent version and found that the game would not start ...