Ok… Apparently they are serious about having only one source of power, USB /or/ direct, but not both. After resetting, it appears to be ok.
Also, for some strange reason it was detecting the ESP-32 Devkit C v4 as an Adafruit Huzzah ESP-8266. (bottom status line). Correcting that may have helped.
The main thing was just re-doing the driver thing over and over and over until it finally showed up the way it is supposed to in the Device Manager list:
BTW: This guide
https://medium.com/@manuel.bl/low-cost-esp32-in-circuit-debugging-dbbee39e508b
was very helpful, although his pictures clearly show him connecting TCK to pin D1 (wrong) vs 13 as is correct.
So far this is… useable… slow, but usable.