Hi @tallman64,
Happy to help! If you're on Windows, and you're seeing a COM port register for your core, then I'm guessing you have the necessary drivers to talk to the core over serial. I'm guessing you're running into the same thing I did when I first used putty on Windows -> make sure you're on the "Session" tab, and using the serial radio button, and not the "Serial" tab on the left:
Alternatively, you can always install the spark-cli, and use spark setup to get your core going over serial: GitHub - particle-iot/spark-cli: DEPRECATED: Renamed to particle-cli. See https://github.com/spark/particle-cli
I hope that helps!
Thanks,
David