Problem with project audio file names after hdd to hdd transfer to new computer

That's a weird one. It would appear that somehow during the file copy process something deemed those leading blanks extraneous and dropped them. Programs routinely trim leading and trailing blanks from pathnames, as they are normally mistakes, e.g. a full path was parsed that had more than one delineating blank between tokens, and inadvertently left behind an extraneous blank.
 
I'm guessing that if you went back to the old computer and examined the filenames, that they do have those leading blanks. Why they had those leading blanks in the first place is another mystery entirely.
 
But weird or not, they need to be there in order to match the expectations of the cwp. I'd try to determine where in the transfer process they got dropped. After verifying that they are present on the old computer, check your external drive and see if they are still there at that intermediate stage. 
 
I assume you simply dragged the folders via Windows File Explorer (as opposed to a backup/restore utility). You could try re-copying the project folders outside of Explorer. I almost always use a DOS window when copying files for backups, using the XCOPY command.