The absence of offline plate solving is the one thing stopping me from using the Windows version of Kstars vs theUbuntu VM. I've been playing around a little bit with ansvr which is a Cygwin implementation of astrometry.net put together by Andy Galasso of PHD2 fame Astrtortilla also uses astrometry.net with its own Cygwin compilation of astrometry.net but is only sporadically supported these days I have reconfigured Astrotortilla on my PC to use the ansvr version successfully so I don't need two versions of Cygwin running on my PC (nor two versions of the indexes). In fact I put them on a drive shared with the VM.
Ansvr is also used in SGP as a blind plate-solving option.
If we could somehow shoehorn it into Kstars for windows I think that would complete the suite there. Being an implementation of astrometry.net the call to solve-field is identical.
You could use a vm with a minimal/headless ubuntu install, running only indi astrometry server, and use "remote" option of ekos
(remember you can chain multiple indi server instances on different hosts)
Gilles