@bacum. Good that some things are working now. There are still some possible confusions in what you present. Sorry if the confusion is mine.
COM17 is the name of my Arduino’s port. Yours will probably be different. I prefer to state the name not using the name out of the list as in the given example.
In your latest Ard IDE image you are using the Serial monitor (SM) to see the Serial.prints from the Ard sketch. This is good for testing the sketch, but you must close the SM before your Processing sketch can connect to the Ard’s serial port. Only one thing at a time can use the port. Load sketch, SM, Processing. The IDE manages load and SM, but when you start connecting Processing you have to mange the situation. When Processing is connected to Ard you can’t see the Ard’s prints unless you add Processing code to do it. That’s why in my example I used LEDs to show the action.