I have done that. When I run minecraft through the normal executable, it sees forge perfectly fine. The trouble comes when I have to create the shortcut to bypass the previously mentioned issue with the ! in my user name. When I run minecraft through the shortcut, it no longer sees forge. I attempted to create a new user on my computer and run it through there, but that still did not fix the issue, so I have to run minecraft through the shortcut, and that's where I encounter the problem.