Hello, I am hoping someone can help as I haven't been able to get anywhere with Flarum and it's been rather a frustrating experience!

I am using the no public directory version of Flarum "flarum-v1.x-no-public-dir-php8.3" on Apache 2.4.59 with PHP 8.3.8 installed on my Windows test machine. After unzipping the flarum archive into my project I can use the web browser to navigate to the index.php file and it starts the wizard to name the forum and connect to the database. After I fill this in the page lands on "The page you requested could not be found. Return to <my site title>". I can see that the database has populated, so the configuration seems to have worked but nothing I do seems to make the forum work. I have checked the config file, tried it http and https versions, different browsers.

In trying to debug the issue, I have found that the index page gives a debug of RouteNotFoundException, if I access /admin, the page displays "You do not have permission to access this page" ( PermissionDeniedException) and /login says "An error occurred while trying to load this page." (RouteNotFoundException). As far as I can see the htaccess file is being read because if I change parts of it such as Options -Indexes to + then I have directory listing...I feel like I've been over the installation docs again and again, I've tried composer, I've tried the public folder version, I've tried an entirely different machine with a fresh install of both Apache and PHP...Somehow it's falling into the same hole each time. I hate writing help posts, but it feels like it must be something trivial and I'm hoping someone has the answer. Thanks for reading.

Flarum core: 1.8.5
PHP version: 8.3.8
MySQL version: 10.11.8-MariaDB
Loaded extensions: Core, bcmath, calendar, ctype, date, filter, hash, iconv, json, SPL, pcre, random, readline, Reflection, session, standard, mysqlnd, tokenizer, zlib, libxml, dom, PDO, openssl, SimpleXML, xml, xmlreader, xmlwriter, curl, fileinfo, gd, mbstring, mysqli, Phar, pdo_mysql, pdo_pgsql, zip
+----------------------+---------+--------+
| Flarum Extensions | | |
+----------------------+---------+--------+
| ID | Version | Commit |
+----------------------+---------+--------+
| flarum-flags | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-approval | v1.8.1 | |
| flarum-tags | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-suspend | v1.8.1 | |
| flarum-subscriptions | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-sticky | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-statistics | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-mentions | v1.8.3 | |
| flarum-markdown | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-lock | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-likes | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-lang-english | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-emoji | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-bbcode | v1.8.0 | |
+----------------------+---------+--------+
Base URL: https://localhost/pcs/forum
Installation path: C:\apache24\htdocs\pcs\forum
Queue driver: sync
Session driver: file
Mail driver: mail
Debug mode: off