Hello Bob,
I have never heard of so many problems with TB as seem to be manifesting themselves these days. I have just about every version ever put out, up to V5.5b19, and although the v5.5 has a few bugs, they were due to the Windows wrapper, not the core TB itself. The core code of TB has NEVER changed since it was invented ages ago. The only thing that has been changing is the later tinkering to try to make it run under Windows, and at one time on Macs. The last version which performed flawlessly (that I have) was v.5.33. With that one, as with the earlier ones, the extra dlls were required to accompany any bound programs. People apparently complained about the dlls, so v.5.5 was supposed to change it so that the dlls were not necessary. It did eliminate the requirement for the dlls, but at the price of introducing bugs.
I think the current problems lie in the "installer" or whatever they have incorporated into the v6's, and possibly there are some problems with the "new" editor. That editor was a noble effort on the part of John Arscott (BigJohn), who was about the most knowledgeable person about TB ever on this forum, but the problems started up mostly with the advent of v.6. BigJohn would probably have an answer for your problem, but alas he has not posted in quite a while. This forum surely needs him.
I doubt if the problems were due to the editor; I tried the trial V.6 Bronze a few years ago just to see what the new editor was like. It seemed to work OK, but since I prefer to use an external text editor along with the TB.exe directly I never bothered with v.6. There is NOTHING new in the basic core code, so the only "new" things are the editor and the "installer", whatever that amounts to.
There has never been any need to actually "install" any of the previous versions; I used every one of them by just copying the files to some folder, including on removable media, and just clicked and ran the thing with never a single problem. I still do that. I don't have Win 10 but I'll bet money it will work on Win 10 as well.
Since I don't have v.6 I don't know what files one winds up with nor what the "installer" does with them. But if you can get to the TBsystem.exe you should be able to circumvent the other stuff and all those problems.
I see that from the "TB products" page one can buy the "legacy" v5.5 for about $45 and If I'm not mistaken that comes with two versions of the TBsystem. I believe one of them is the same as in v5.33 and so that with the dlls (which can also be downloaded) you could cobble up a workable setup. I think that is possible, but can't guarantee it. It's really too bad they don't just offer the v.5.33 version itself. Frankly, unless you can code in C, the Gold version doesn't really add any new feature to what's in the Silver version. It adds a capability to write your own dlls in C and have TB utilize them.
With the v.5.5 and v.5.33, what I do is write my code in an external editor, save it (either as .tru or .txt; doesn't matter), then open the "old" TB editor which comes with either of these versions, and run the code. If there is an error, the TB command window tells the error and the offending line number. Since I don't use line numbers in my programs, I direct the text editor to the offending line, correct it, save the file, go back the the TB editor, reopen the file, and run it again. This is actually much quicker to do that it sounds. I don't really use the TB editor for anything except to just run (or compile, or bind) the code. When I get the code running satisfactorily, I try to run it in the somewhat buggy v.5.5. If it runs OK, then I'll bind it into an .exe so the extra dlls aren't needed. If it won't run properly under v5.5, then I just bind it with the v.5.33 and just have to live with lugging the dlls around with the exe.
Sorry I can't actually help with your problem.
Regards,
Mike C.