Okay, I think the issue is that I was supposed to create a "watching-only wallet," which isn't clear from the online tutorial. Then again, this step is probably implied to anyone who's not a newb.
THANK YOU for clarifying this. I too was following https://electrum.org/tutorials.html#restoring-seed and couldn't figure out how to create a seedless wallet (Windows). I never thought about selecting "Create a watching-only version of an existing wallet", although as you said, thinking about it, it's "obvious" 
.It might be worthwhile to get this mentioned explicitly in the next revision of the tutorial.
- Dave
