Ron,
I have had strange timing results too.... but often, the solve would not complete quickly & so it hit the issue I have already described... I reported the issue to Jasem, who fixed it yesterday....
This is why I suggested that you were hitting the same issue.... I have no idea as to occasionally why the solve happened quickly, but 9 times out of 10 it failed.... not any more - I tested it 10 out of 10 times today....
I just pushed changes to mark "Offline solver" as disabled under Windows to avoid any future confusion. I used the ANSVR as online solver to blind-solve the image again and it was solved in 46 seconds.
What was confusing to me was to have an offline option but having to use the online option with the URL set to local host. The offline option should have had that built in, I would have thought. But I am no programming expert. So are you actually disabling the offline capability under Windows or just removing the offline solver option? Those of us who have the offline solver working will still have the ability to use it I assume.
I think "Offline" was intended for "bits local to a Linux system with Astrometry installed" whereas Online is intended for the Astrometry.net site or ANSVR on Windows. Remote is on the INDI Server and limited to only solving captured photos from the CCD.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Jasem Mutlaq
Exactly as Bill pointed out. I will update the documentation in the next few days to cover all of this. So offline means a local astrometry.net that you can directly launch, which currently only happens on Linux/Mac. With "Online", you can use the actual astrometry.net online service or ANSVR which is an emulator for it but ones that runs offline.
For anyone curious, I set up a dual boot on my system with Ubuntu to try out PixInsight, KStars/Ekos, and Astrometry.net on Linux natively, and I have to say that the performance is significantly better for all of them.
Looks like I am going to keep the dual boot and use Linux for Astrophotography work, and Windows for playing games. I can blind solve on my system in less than 20 seconds, and normal solves are about 2-4 seconds. Crazy good.