I have several versions of kafka installed: kafka_2.12-2.8.0 and kafka_2.12_3.0.0
I followed the procedure outlined here: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-install-and-run-apache-kafka-on-windows/
this works fine for the older version of kafka but not the latest version. kafka starts then shutsdown. I am interested to see if anyone has had this experience.