First, welcome to our fine club. And I think you are way, way overthinking this, bytehead.
I gather, you are running qb64 on Windows. Think in terms of how you'd do this back in DOS days.
1. Unzip the big qb64 self-extracting .7z file somewhere in your PC. That self-extracting file creates a qb64 folder and lots of subfolders.
2. Look inside that qb64 folder, not the subfolders, the first level folder. And you'll see something called qb64.exe.
3. Launch qb64.exe. End of story.
That launches the familiar-looking QuickBasic IDE, to default settings, which are the same settings as used in the original Microsoft QB. You can adjust it to be bigger, different colors, etc, in the options tab. (I set my IDE display to 150 by 43, for example. Infinitely easier to work with.)
Done.
Should there ever be a need for you to recompile qb64.exe, say because you made some manual changes to qb64, you can open the IDE as described above, then go to the "source" subfolder in the qb64 folder, and open the qb64.bas file in that source folder (where the manual changes were entered). Wait for the IDE to say "OK," and the run qb64.bas. This will automatically create a qb64(2).exe file, in that qb64 folder.
For a regular user, that's really all you need to know.