I'd like an HTML home pg with WP in a subfolder

Using Network Solutions as host, my first time with them, I’m going round and round trying to get WP login and menu to understand. I look at Dashboard/settings/permalinks and I see that WordPress doesn’t know I have it in a subfolder. I got it to work by using custom structure but then the menu doesn’t seem to understand. Where did I go wrong? Should I reinstall it again? I would, but I’d like to know what clue to follow for successful install in a subfolder. Network Solutions had some automatic long name for a subfolder but I wanted to use a shorter name, like wp. NetSol wouldn’t let me use a two letter name so I named it forwp. Is it NetSol or WP who doesn’t want me to do this this way??