It’s a good thing I got on the Blockstack Slack, because the approach I was taking was not sustainable. Sure, you can use windows subsystem for Linux and get pretty far along. I feel like I did. But once I ran into troubles the Slack team, Aaron specifically, helped me out by pointing to the just recently created Windows installer. It sets up a set of docker containers that run the Blockstack core, the browser, and a proxy service to allow you to use the browser on your windows machine without any problems*.
So I went through the setup of that and now have a fully functioning Blockstack browser on my windows box. I’m not sure if the windows installer is really ready for prime time, but I got the impression that the team would appreciate help tracking down issues with it. I’m sure if you join the Blockstack Slack and want to check it out, they’ll make it happen.
* I did have one problem as I tried to get it working, and it actually turned into an addressable issue that I filed against their packaging repository. The browser and the core communicate with each other using a password to keep things secure. But because of how that password is passed, there are certain characters that are not allowed. After we tracked down that that was keeping my browser and core from communicating with each other, I got things working fine and filed the issue to have that documented, so it doesn’t trip others up in the future.