OK
I got the 6.X driver installed and output now appears in the serial terminal window. The procedure, if it helps others, is to uninstall the device and then download/re-install the 6.X drivers from here:
https://www.silabs.com/products/development-tools/software/usb-to-uart-bridge-vc... However, the utility to upload files to SPIFFs still doesn't work. With verbose ON, all that happens is that shown on the screenshot in my first post. Nothing else. So I didn't really think I'd need to attach a 1 line text file....
But if I occupy the port with, say the Arduino port monitor, then I get this:
ESP32FSUpload.exe
Traceback (most recent call last)
File "esptool.py", line 2959, in <module>
File "esptool.py", line 2952, in _main
File "esptool.py", line 2652, in main
File "esptool.py", line 222, in __init__
File "site-packages\serial\__init__.py", line 88, in serial_for_url
File "site-packages\serial\serialwin32.py", line 62, in open
serial.serialutil.SerialException*: could not open port COM60: WindowsError(5, Access is denied.)
Failed to execute script esptool
I am on VM 1.1905.26