Pyinstaller error

[astroman133]

I am a new Python user and have written a gui app using tkinter on Windows using Visual Studio 2022 to edit and debug the code. Now I am trying to figure out how to package the application for sharing with users.

I am trying to use pyinstaller to package the app for publishing and distribution. I get a hard error similar to the OP of this thread. Here is the last fragment from the pyinstaller output (with log-level DEBUG)

Error:
  File "C:\Users\Rick\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\PyInstaller\lib\modulegraph\modulegraph.py", line 2143, in _load_module
    src = loader.get_source(partname)
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 940, in get_source
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 713, in decode_source
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x96 in position 5582: invalid start byte

I have uploaded a large zip file of my entire project, and the complete output from pyinstaller to the following dropbox link:

Dropbox link to project files

Any help is greatly appreciated.