[Rwp] Help with noise removal

[Nolan Darilek]

Hey all. New to Reaper and decided to give it a shot after fighting with 
Audacity for years and feeling like it makes my light audio editing a 
pain. I've been reading lots, and while there's plenty of information 
out there, it seems to be presented across several different sources and 
makes getting up and running challenging. So apologies if there are 
basic answers to my questions which I just haven't found.

My setup is Reaper 5.20 with the Osara plugin running under NVDA. I have 
a track recorded on a somewhat noisy digital recorder, so my first task 
is removing noise.

I've found this guide:

http://www.homebrewaudio.com/reafir-madness-hidden-noise-reduction-tool-in-reaper/

To make my task easier, I recorded about 30 seconds of ambient noise on 
my recorder before my voice begins. I set the loop start/end points, 
enabled repeat, ensured that the track contains only noise. Then I 
followed these instructions right up to the point where I'm told to 
close the effects window, which I can't seem to do. What I do is enable 
the Create Noise Profile checkbox and play my noise, but nothing I do 
ever gets it removed.

Also, this article seems to imply that eventually you'll hear silence, 
because the noise filter will remove the noise from the repeated track. 
I never hear silence. Instead, I hear my noisy loop repeated again and 
again. Additionally, the Osara commands shift/control-shift-p claim 
there are no effects on the selected tracks. This leads me to believe 
that I'm just editing effect parameters, and there's some enable/persist 
step obvious in the UI but not apparent to accessibility. I think 
there's a bit in the performance settings dialog where it shows effect 
performance, but I never see the values climb above 0.

What am I missing? Trying to be patient but this is enormously 
frustrating. I'm a software developer with lots of experience, and 
Reaper shouldn't be *this* confusing. :) Audio editing sure, but I can't 
even apply an effect.

Thanks.