When I open AE, I get the following screen:
The Dialog box, asks for the login into ECC to retrieve the info about CMS location.
Once you log in, you can verify the location of the CMS in the Tools > Configuration > Repository tab
you should see the following:
Root folder: you setup this one when you initially install AE. It can be changed when you want.
Server URL: this is the location of CMS that is fetched from ECC
Next, you need to connect to the Repository Explorer via Tools > Repository Explorer
Click on Connect, then you ask asked to log into the CMS and enter credentials. ( I use two different login, you can create the same user ID for login into ECC and CMS in different system and assign appropriate roles too)
Once you connect to the CMS, you can release and publish your changes from local drive to the CMS.
Once the content is available in Master Repository (CMS) you can check it with LSO_PUBLISHER and create the course out of it.
Opening AE through LAS.BAT is fine. This file sets variables and paths to java directory, It open the java application.
I open AE through LAS.bat as well so that should be fine on our side.