Hey! I figured it out. The staf.cfg file was the culprit. I entered the modifications exactly as written in the guide. The issue was, in the guide they used slashes to break it down into multiple lines for readability. But it was erroring on that so I put it back to a single line and now it starts without any errors.
Thanks for your help on this - if you had not pointed me to the config file in the first place, I wouldn't have known where to start 
-Don