All the credit and then some to sitepoint for their interesting article on setting up Ant for builds on Windows OS.
Their tutorial provided the direction necessary to get POI going (sort of)..I had a conflicting instance of Ant from a previous
app's installation (see ExistDB software) but presumably after uninstalling that I'll be good as new..
Here's a pdf of the article in case sitepoint goes down - note credit due to sitepoint for citational credibility..