Google drive fails to start Mac mini (old) macos 12.7.6

Starting Google Drive gives a popup with this message: "Google Drive has encountered a macOS File Provider error. This might be resolved by restarting your computer. For best results, ensure your computer is running the latest version of macOS." Restarting the machine makes no difference and 12.7.6 is the latest available for my hardware (Mac mini (Late 2014)), yes it is 10 years old and I can't afford to buy a new one : ( No errors in system logs. I was having problems with Google Drive not reflecting changes that I had made on another machine so I uninstalled GD deleted the directories (which I now suspect was a mistake) restarted, installed GD again and got the error on starting it. Searching for the first sentence of the message got lots of hits but nothing useful and applicable to my situation. I ran First Aid on the hard disk which reported no errors in case there were filesystem problems that might cause the error. Is there anyway of getting some more diagnostics about what is actually wrong?