Try it again after the maintenance that's going on today, that may be throwing weird errors. The old style launcher (the one that's still SF-styled) has the big red text about changing your password but you don't have to actually keep doing it, it was just added after the network came back up and they've never removed it (there's still a bunch of places that have that type text).
Now on the other part... Everquest2.exe is *never* a launcher. It it always the actual game executable that will take you right in to the game and skip the patcher. You may be confusing it with EQ2.exe, which is the original style launchpad (v1) that is Sentinel's Fate-styled.
You probably have multiple EQ2 installs (or at least multiple patchers). If you use the station launcher, then you do exactly what you did: set the Everquest2.exe file path to your EQ2 install and then set the autolaunch to the launcher for the station launcher.
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