Unable to use customize.php theme-install.php after new install

Hello all. Have just rebuilt a wordpress install after my original crashed due I think to disk space issues. For this install I used WAMP and made sure that the versions of WordPress Apache PHP PHPMyAdmin. Maria and SQL were all the most recent. WAMP also needed an earlier version of PHP. After installing and startup of wordpress I was able to search for and load the Gutenslider and sticky-menu plug-ins. However when I tried to look-up and install a new theme ( Harrison in this case) I ended up with a white screen. I eventually did a manual install of the harrison theme which then came up correctly represented on the list of installed themes. I had no trouble activating and deactivating themes, including twenty-sixteen and twenty-seventeen, but when I tried to view or preview any except twenty-sixteen the representation was all out of scale and backgrounds were incorrect. What has me really confused is that twenty-sixteen has the correct appearance and the page scrolling worked fine, but with the others things were very wrong. I have also found that customize, theme-install and post-new do not work – all produce a white screen except for the sidebar, which consists only of the header and footer. After clicking on “customize” there is a lot of activity “transferring data from localhost” but when that stops the white screen remains. I have deactivate the plug-ins and gone through my settings as far as I feel confident in doing, and can see nothing obviously wrong. I am wondering if there is an incompatibility between the themes and PHP or perhaps some fragment of my previous install has somehow found its way into the new one via the database. I do not think that is possible but someone who knows more than I might be able to advise? There was no indication of a stray database during configuration.
I have been looking at this as best I can for a few days but am going nowhere. Thanks in advance for any advice.