Thanks for the clarification, Ivan! Yes, I would support the exclusion of the .exe from future version of the package installer 😀
I was wondering why Excalibur wasn't working on my system, and it now makes sense that the extension signature became invalidated because Bitdefender Antivirus automatically deleted the spellbook.exe file from the package when it (falsely) detected it as malware). When I excluded this path from scanning, and reinstalled Excalibur, it worked as expected.