So here is my update should anyone care
Yesterday I went to Microcenter and bought a commercial CD burning program (Cordell Roxio), a Dell external CD drive and a new microSD card.
Last night I spent another very frustrating three hours and could not get my $3,000 Alienware laptop with the new software (easily installed) and SanDisc external card reader to work The laptop would not even "see" the DX260 or card reader.
I am lucky to work at a law firm with a good IT guy who came in today to install some new computers.
I popped it on him without advance notice that I had brought everything with me to work for him to try to figure out my problem.
He immediately looked put-off and said "I don't know anything about digital audio players and burning CD's"
The funny thing is that as soon as he started he got more and more interested.
He intuited by just playing around with my laptop that we were missing a needed driver. He found one from a third party (NOT iBasso) that allowed the laptop to "see" the DX260. You might ask for the name and I will have to look for that.
He also by sheer intelligence and intuition played with the DX260 and told me that I needed to use Mango and go to settings (wheel at upper right corner) and "Advanced" and then "MTP" and get MTP enabled (it will take several attempts to make it stay on so toggle between on and off until it remains "on") before my PC and the DX260 see each other.
And then all was cool.
He also somehow figured out that while hooked up to my PC and hitting "scan and merge" within Mango my DX260 auto-populated with just about every CD I had ever burned in my lifetime. It was frigging miraculous.
It still makes little sense to me.
And even using Roxio and having a good destination path the drag and drop process is tedious.
But I am good.
FWIW, my IT guy Alex suggested that saving new music to the microSD is easier for some reason with the DX260 than to the internal memory.
I am still very unhappy with my well known etailer (they have headphones in their biz logo) for not lifting a finger to help.
I realize it is difficult to assist without seeing all equipment in the real world but.....