Ok, I think I now understand why it was reporting a usb hub to the win10 box. I have a little usb hub that connects to the pi zero, and it's been a while since I actually installed it, and I thought that it was connected via the gpio, but it's not. It actually mounts like a HAT, but it has little plunger connectors that actually connect right to the zero's usb connector (there's 2 little contacts right by the connector that it connects to).
Anyway, I basically threw a dart, and said, I wonder if this would work if I took the hub off the zero. So, I uninstalled the hub, and tried again, and poof now it's not reporting a hub to the win10 box anymore. It briefly reported an RNDIS/Ethernet gadget (which is obviously what I want), but then quickly changed it to a serial port. So now I'm at the point, where it is creating a new COM port (COM3), which doesn't actually work, because I'm running g_ether, and not g_serial. lol. Anyways, it's progress I guess. Now to figure out how to make it stop switching to a usb serial device.