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Ok, so this was unsurprisingly my mistake. When I use docker desktop I soft linked the .kube directory from within WSL to my windows %USERPROFILE%/.kube directory (a dangerous practice I now realise - only linking the config files as rancher does is much safer). With that soft linking set up, I started Rancher Desktop with wsl integration - and Rancher Desktop wanted to soft link the config file much in the same way I did for the directory. As could be expected, the behaviour is pretty much undefined. In my case the config file was not written in Windows either.