OK - here is the resolution to my problem. first off though before i share, thank you to everyone for the guidance and advice. If anyone needs a pic 3 programmer in Toronto (east end of the city) i'm ready/willing and hopefully able to help. I bought one at lunch today incase it was a pixelnet programmed dongle, but confirmed with Zach it's dmx. so i have one now ready to go for the future when the coop LEs arrive so not money wasted....anyways issue was show PC settings. I do believe the red LED is hosed but in the future i'll swap the led to see if that makes it light up...or could be another bad led...regardless as long as I know that it's cosmetic and i can confirm power with the green led, i'm not going to stress it. I changed the windows com port setting in software to something that i know wouldn't conflict with the other serial ports of the computer. once I did that the test sequence in xlights worked like a champ.
now i can move onto testing over wireless and then move on to some basic sequencing work.
again - to all who helped with this it's my first day with blinky flashy. i'm a happy guy!!!
cheers!
ryan