Let's stop wasting everyone's time playing silly semantic games.
Let's instead, move the technical ball forward.

What we want now, is to have a *single* encrypted passwd file for the LAN.
It would need to work with all machines & mobile devices on the LAN.

That requires some kind of central "server".

Perhaps that's the native SMB server inherent in Windows?
\\server\share\path\file.ext

Or perhaps that's some other server, e.g., ftp, or http?
http://192.168.1.10/path/file.htm

What do you think?

Now that we have the original tasks both successfully working perfectly on
the first pass on any given Windows machine, what is your astute
recommendation for consolidating both the passwd and data files as a single
file accesssed from all Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS machines on your
local LAN?