I followed the links in your post reading everything carefully. A comment to one of the StackOverflow questions had an easy solution to the problem, as follows (in case anyone else runs into this):

Add the following value of type DWORD to the registry at the indicated key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console
  VirtualTerminal = 1
[download]

Problem solved and thank you! I spent several hours trying to figure this one out...