Dear Dan,
from your post I can read that you are deeply annoyed by Gpg4win.
I appologize that Gpg4win has contributed to this!
We know that Gpg4win and several crypto procedures or current best practices
are lacking usability a lot. However we make Gpg4win which implements OpenPGP available as is, because it is already very useful to many.
Thanks for taking the time to write down your feedback, we will try harder (within the available help and funding) to make it easier for you and everyone else!
From your feedback I am having a question:
Which download where you trying to verify? The package from https://tails.boum.org ?
Which instructions did you try to follow in particular? Maybe the instructions can be improved.
Note that recognition of file types in Kleopatra currently depends on the file suffix.
This seems to be one of the issue you were encountering, It is on our wishlist
to improve this behaviour: http://wiki.gnupg.org/Gpg4win/Wishlist#Ability_to_decrypt_files_that_do_not_have_the_.gpg_extension_in_their_filename
Regards,
Bernhard