I'm attempting to get CjBlog set up, and am running into some strange problems.

Links appear ok when you mouse-over them, but sef converter (router?) keeps turning them into trash (and I'm not sure if it's the CJblog router, or the main joomla one).

System:
IIS on Server 2016
PHP 7.2.1
MySQL 8.0.11

Downloaded and installed CjBlog from the corejoomla website (have also checked the git repo).

Here's a list of what's not working:

• My Stuff dropdown: My Profile Summary link is badly formed (http://<site name>/index.php/cjblog/profile/btmtest) and shows same page as the Blogs link (diff urls, same content)
• My Stuff dropdown: My Favorites link doesn't get changed (remains as .../index.php/cjblog/profile?id=0&layout=favorites), but takes you to the cjblog profile page, summary tab
• CjBlog Profile Page - Edit Profile button yields a "Check-out failed with the following error:" and no error text.
• CjBlog Profile Page - Download My data button yields a corrupted zip file with the following string at the beginning of the zip file "<br /><b>Notice</b>:  Trying to get property 'avatar' of non-object in <b>E:WWWnwf-joomlacomponentscom_cjblogmodelsprofile.php</b> on line <b>482</b><br/>"
  when I strip off the bad data, the zip extracts and has a bunch of similar errors in index.html (errors for each piece of data in the non-existant profile object)
• All of the links on the tabs end up looking like ".../index.php/cjblog/profile/btmtest?tab=articles", and don't take you to proper place

I've created a non-visible menu with all of the CjBlog modules in it, with appropriate names (same as the demo site here). 

Any direction to look at to solve this would be greately appreciated. The website is internal only at the moment (there's no outward facing name yet). I suspect it's something easy to fix, but I've exhausted every configuration option I can find...

If you need to see it, I can give you internal name & an external IP to stuff into hosts, along with temporary admin rights.

Thank you for your time.