Hi Bill,
Sorry for the delay on this!
Regarding the Kaspersky exclusion object, I think that may be a bad recommendation after looking into it further. Did you go through the steps under the “Remove Read-only Attribute” section in addition to trusting Local in Kaspersky?
As far as the Unable to fetch WordPress version from wp-includes/version.php issue goes, the site may have failed to provision. Is it a brand new site you added in Local or did you import it into Local?
If it’s a brand new site, I recommend trying to create a new site in Local with the Preferred environment to test that site creation in Local works on your PC.