Quartus did not start

Different engineers in our group have different versions of Quartus installed. One of them has also successfully tested Pro version 25.3 after explicit Sophos exclusions were added. We have not had any issues with Quartus Prime or Lite. I will update the solution post above if I find that additional steps were needed beyond what's listed there.  Note that the exclusion is drive specific - if one user has installed on C:\ and another on D:\ that requires two explicit exclusions.