We followed up via email and after an unfortunately very painful process of cornel uninstalling other software to see what is interfering with Spine, it turned out to be Comodo. Even if you disable Comodo, it is still doing stuff and mucking with other programs! This is pretty rude and I'd recommend uninstalling Comodo for this reason. Once uninstalled, Spine runs as it should.
I wrote this to cornel via email, but I'll paste it here too, in case others find it useful:
If it helps, what I have been using for many years is Malwarebytes Windows Firewall Control (WFC):
https://www.binisoft.org/wfc
This is not actually a firewall, instead it is just a UI that helps you manage rules for Windows' built-in firewall. You can have it show a popup so you can click allow/deny when new software tries to communicate over the network. Besides the popup, it has a list of firewall rules and a log, so you can see what has been blocked/allowed. That is all it does! No antivirus, no interfering with other software. 🙂 It just makes the Windows firewall actually usable. The Windows firewall seems efficient, which makes sense since it is part of the OS.
Note WFC is not the full Malwarebytes suite of antivirus junk. WFC is free from binisoft. I think Malwarebytes bought binisoft at some point, that is why WFC has the Malwarebytes name.
