OK, I think I got nightly builds figured out and downloaded.
I think it created a 2nd installation of codeblocks in my downloads folder and I had to move the other files extracted from the 7z files into that folder.
the version of the new installation of codeblocks now shows as
Name                    : Code::Blocks
Version                 : svn-r13493
SDK Version             : 2.25.0
Scintilla Version       : 3.7.5
Author                  : The Code::Blocks Team
E-mail                  : info@codeblocks.org
Website                 : 
https://www.codeblocks.orgOS                      : Windows 10 (build 19045), 64-bit edition
Scaling factor          : 1.000000
Detected scaling factor : 1.000000
Display PPI             : 96x96
Display count           : 1
Display 0 (\\.\DISPLAY1): XY=[0,0]; Size=[1920,1080]; Primary
wxWidgets Library (wxMSW port)
Version 3.2.4 (Unicode: wchar_t, debug level: 1),
compiled at Dec  9 2023 17:38:11
Runtime version of toolkit used is 10.0.
It loads my most recent workspace/project but running the project still has the same path issue so that none of my images or data files are loading.
When I re-downloaded the 20.03, that was not a nightly build right?   So I effectively installed one version of codeblocks on top of an identical version?
I think that is how i got the path problem.   I actually tried to reinstall twice thinking something went wrong the first time.
The bug i was originally trying to fix was not particularly important.  It was more of a nuisance I usually wasn't bothered by.   The path problem is a bigger problem.   I would be happy to uninstall codeblocks and reinstall if I thought that would fix it but I am afraid it won't.  If I did reinstall I'm afraid I might then need to reinstall opengl files or gcc files too.
I could also maybe work around this by moving my data files to the debug folder or maybe the bin folder.