I have an old HDD that corrupted quite recently. It is where I installed the dependencies for Visual Studio (pretty rookie move, I understand that now). I backed up as much as I could. And then I reinstalled Visual Studio 2022 on my C:

I had to jump through some hurdles as VS was still referencing the old drive via regedit (which the VS installation helpdesk helped me out with). But now when I try to #include <windows.h> VS returns me an E1696 error.

I did go through numerous pages on stack overflow. The most helpful one being this one.

But my problem is still present.
That last thread helped me realize that the $(WindowsSDK_IncludePath) does not seem to return valid values all the way through
as shown here

I have a suspicion that the lines starting with a backslash should instead be starting with a C:Windows Kits10

I am completely unsure what to do next, or how to solve that reference generating issue (since, from my understanding, those are generated through installation from what I understand). Also, yes I reinstalled numerous times (including a repair which ended up breaking more things than repairing anything. i.e. brand new project wouldn’t even load)