I tried so much of what you shared. Thank you @mlauber71!
I ended up uninstalling R, R Studio, Rtools, and KNIME. I followed the install instructions once again ( making sure I was doing so as an administrator) and immediately saw a change in the error messages.
One thing I did differently this time is selecting the options to only install only the 64bit versions. The other strategy was to run R & R Studio as an administrator and changing the library paths to the R home folder before installing any packages.
After Compiling Rserve using @mattflor’s instructions, I loaded Rserve. It took some time to figure out there are a few steps to run before I start working in KNIME and I found that here , this turned out to be a critical step for me. I was able to run the workflow you linked above and I also ran the R_Intro_1 workflow (Intro_to_R_in_Knime). This workflow requires additional packages to be installed and once they were installed, I got green lights all the way!
I am fairly new to KNIME and a newbie to R, so this was definitely an exercise in patience over many days… 7 DAYS! Sticking with it was rewarding. I really hope this helps future learners.
Thanks again for your help with this matter.
Best wishes,
NR