Hi Andrei
I seem to have resolved the issues by a complete reinstall of WAMP . This was only done yesterday but everything now seems to be working ok. However I have not reloaded or tested some of the plug-ins that I was previously using (sticky . As I have deleted all of the files (including downloads of discrete PHP etc) associated with the previous install I cannot advise re the version of PHP that WAMP was accessing. I had so many downloads of PHP (and MySQL, Maria etc) on my disk that WAMP may have picked up the wrong version. That is why I decided to do a complete reinstall.
Thanks for your inquiry with this one – I have left the issue open until I am sure everything is actually working ok.