So after a couple days of losing my mind.....
I discovered that windows had an update called "smart screen." some sort of secondary virus/firewall thingy (I use Norton nominally). This was not allowing the exe to fire up.
I went through a bunch of help videos on how to edit the registry to eliminate this from starting up and once I did that, it fired up.
Apparently there was some sort of setting that "allowed" it to load a few times, then locked it down as not trusted. With that gone, and Norton trusting it, everything is running smooth.
Thanks for the ideas and sympathy ;)