Thank you for all of your troubleshooting and detail sharing here. It’s definitely curious, but I’m glad that you’ve narrowed down things and also that subsequent sites are working normally.
Regarding your other comment above, you’re correct in that WP Migrate requires a PRO upgrade in order to use it for moving sites out of Local elsewhere. There are obviously other ways you could go about transferring files that would be free, but if you plan on moving lots of sites back and forth in the future it might be worth the investment.
You’ll have to check with your IT then if it’s possible for them to grant you admin privileges to be able to allow Local to work on your machine. Otherwise you may need to use a different machine where you have full control.
Update. Definitely something in my site. I got so frustrated I wiped the whole 2nd site, database/wp and all. Started over, new install, spent a day just connecting up and configuring plugins, and just did a migrate into Local now and it works. I thought it was maybe remnants from my Wordfence security plugin, but thats in the new one and it didn’t stop it. I have the same issue with a 3rd site also so it wasn’t a one off what ever it is.