Conda not recognized by terminal, even though it is in PATH

Question

I had multiple problems with my installation of Python on my Windows machine, which made me want to uninstall everything (Python, Anaconda, etc.) and just set it up again from scratch. That also made it possible to use Miniforge3 instead of the commercial Anaconda.

I installed the latest version of Miniforge3 for Windows 10 (just for my user) and checked the prompt to add Miniforge3 to PATH. This did work, as I found a directory in the user environment PATH.

This makes it very weird to me, that neither the Windows terminal nor Miniforge Prompt recognizes conda or python. Every answer on here or elsewhere points to add it to the PATH, but from what I understood, it should be enough to have the necessary directories in the uses environment variables.

The main problem:

• Neither the terminal, nor Miniforge Prompt recognizes conda or python, so no environments can be activated and no scripts can be run

What I tried:

1. Installation with automatic addition to PATH
2. Installation with manual addition to PATH after the installation was finished

What the user PATH looks like:

• C:\Users\firstname lastname\miniforge3
• C:\Users\firstname lastname\miniforge3\Library\mingw-w64\bin
• C:\Users\firstname lastname\miniforge3\Library\usr\bin
• C:\Users\firstname lastname\miniforge3\Library\bin
• C:\Users\firstname lastname\miniforge3\Scripts
• ...

the _conda.exe file is located in the first directory of the PATH