Gazebo Unable to Intialize SDF

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Hi folks,

I am brand new to ROS & Gazebo and apologize for any shortcomings of this question due to my own naivety.

I have gotten ROS1 melodic & Gazebo9 installed on Windows and such that I am able to run roslaunch gazebo_ros empty_world.launch. What I am trying to do now is normalize & automate that installation process (in a non-default directory) so that developer experience is consistent from machine to machine. I have almost everything in order, but something is off with SDF. Seems like maybe I need to set some additional path variables or something, but I haven't figured out how to get any more diagnostics information than --verbose. Next step, I guess, is to compile from source and debug it, but thought I'd ask here before going to that length.

sdformat.dll & .lib are in both PATH & LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and from looking in DependencyWalker.exe, it looks like they have all of the dependencies they need, yet I still get SDF errors when running Gazebo. Can I further instruct Gazebo how to run it? Can I get some more detailed diagnostics output?

Errors look like:

gzserver --verbose worlds\empty.world
[Err] [..\gazebo\Server.cc:391] Unable to initialize sdf
[Wrn] [..\gazebo\Server.cc:341] Falling back on worlds/empty.world
[Err] [..\gazebo\Server.cc:391] Unable to initialize sdf

gz sdf -p ros\melodic\x64\share\urdf_tutorial\urdf\01-myfirst.urdf
ERROR: SDF parsing the xml failed

Gazebo env looks like:

set | findstr /i "gazebo"
GAZEBO_MASTER_URI=http://localhost:11345
GAZEBO_MODEL_DATABASE_URI=http://models.gazebosim.org
GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH=installDir\rosdeps\x64\share\gazebo-9\models;
GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH=installDir\rosdeps\x64\lib\gazebo-9\plugins;
GAZEBO_RESOURCE_PATH=installDir\rosdeps\x64\share\gazebo-9;

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!