The absence of offline plate solving is the one thing stopping me from using the Windows version of Kstars vs theUbuntu VM. I've been playing around a little bit with ansvr which is a Cygwin implementation of astrometry.net put together by Andy Galasso of PHD2 fame Astrtortilla also uses astrometry.net with its own Cygwin compilation of astrometry.net but is only sporadically supported these days I have reconfigured Astrotortilla on my PC to use the ansvr version successfully so I don't need two versions of Cygwin running on my PC (nor two versions of the indexes). In fact I put them on a drive shared with the VM.
Ansvr is also used in SGP as a blind plate-solving option.
If we could somehow shoehorn it into Kstars for windows I think that would complete the suite there. Being an implementation of astrometry.net the call to solve-field is identical.

You could use a vm with a minimal/headless ubuntu install, running only indi astrometry server, and use "remote" option of ekos
(remember you can chain multiple indi server instances on different hosts)
Gilles

ANSVR is supported in Ekos for a long time under Windows. Here is some documentation: stellarmate.com/support/ekos/align.html#h2-1-1-windows

Brilliant! Thanks Jasem.