Following along, with some caveats,
I'm on Win7 Home Premium 64. I first had to download DirectX 9.0c from Microsoft. I used the webinstaller, it took a little while. Also when running Dark Basic, I needed to run as administrator.
As for navigating Dark Basic, I found it easiest to start a new project ( named it 'Easy' ) saved it, copy and pasted the code, and F5, compile run, that's what worked for me. Thanks for doing this CJH! This looks like it'll be a lot of fun!
Regards,
Scam