thanks Gary.....FYI I ended up getting it to work by taking adapt_authoring-master out of C://program files and just putting it in C://

Obviously it being in a folder that requires permissions is a bad thing! I'm a bit of a noob so this is probably common sense to most people but it was doing my head in for days.

luckily I stumbled across this tutorial which highlighted that it shouldn't be in a folder with permissions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNkecFdO_Q