Beatscape issues...

I'm attempting to use Beatscape live after all these years.  The idea is to have a small handful of pads with just 5th drones and assign the rest as various percussive things.
 
I recorded a couple of fairly steady state pads that should loop easily.  One is just shy of 13 seconds long after I found loops points in WaveLab and trimmed off the extraneous data at either end.  The other was about 8 seconds after the loop/trim.
 
There were a few problems I ran into...

• The 13 second (wav) loop runs for about 13 seconds and then fades out for a bit, rather than immediately looping back to the begining.  Is this indicative that it needs to be a REX file?
• Ok...related to that...is ReCycle the only thing that can create REX files?  Is there something else out there?
• The 8 second loop ends up with slice markers in it.  There doesn't seem to really be a way to remove them.  There's a Remove Marker option, but it doesn't want to work.  You can grab them and move them.  You can add more.  But the remove thing is non-working.
  How do you get around that?
• Once I populated all the pads and saved it to a Program.  I tried opening/running the program in Beatscape on another machine.  None of the pads that were supposed to be loaded with loops from the factory set of REX contents were there.  My guess is that the program file points to the fully specified path rather than using the registry entry...
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Cakewalk Music Software\Beatscape\1.0\\Samples Folder
  ...as the starting point.
  Is there a way around that?
  Unfortunately, the .prog file is binary...so you can't just fix up the paths with a text editor.

Are these things that others have encountered and solved?  (scook?  Mr. Anderton?)

as far as rex files go, only recycle or reason (7 and above)
 

Chregg
poor old beatscape, forgot about that even existing, tbh never found any use for it, dont think anyone else did either, you'd be better using the matrix 

I was trying to use it because it was there.
 
I had completely forgotten about the Matrix View (and the Step Sequencer View for that matter).  The Matrix let me sidestep the "making your own loop" thing by just using the soft synth directly and just holding out a couple of MIDI notes.
 
Now I'm going to have to figure out how all the triggering options are supposed to work...but I have something that I can use for my next set by just triggering columns.
 
Thanks for the tip!