So glad it worked out finally.
I will say, this stuff is tricky on Windows (and I am mostly a Windows user), However, I have an old Thinkpad that I installed Manjaro on. All the fastboot and adb tools were already installed and doing all this stuff just works smoothly. I now exclusively use that Linux laptop for doing this even though I am not all that skilled with Linux (luckily have a couple of knowledgeable friends that give me support).
I don't know why it's such a hassle with Windows, but it always is and I can no longer imagine doing fastboot and adb without Linux. The iron