Thinks is started but "nodedown"

I just installed ejabberd (community server 17.09) to a windows machine (win 7) and cant seem to get it to work.

I look at my services and I see it running (ejabberd01... ), which started automatically, but I don't see "epmd" or "beam" in the processes.

When I run "bin\ejabberdctl status" I get
"Failed RPC connection to the node ejbberd@localhost: nodedown"

When I run "bin\ejabberdctl start" I get
"Error: the ejabberd node ejabberd@localhost is registered and should be running."

Any advise? I just want to do some simple data message passing between a couple custom applications.