I've been trying to root my old S3 so I can play around with a few things but so far I've been unsuccessful.

It's a 2 Degrees model, currently running Android 4.3 stock (which I believe is the latest version from 2 Degrees).  And I've got USB Debugging turned on.

I first started by trying the latest version of Kingo Root (version 1.3.0).  That seemed to be doing something but would loop around saying "Downloading requisite files", "Checking root", "Waiting for device" and doing that over and over for about 5 minutes before my phone would reboot itself (at this point Kingo Root didn't mention anything about rebooting the phone).  After restarting my phone would just sit there even though it was still connected to my PC and Kingo Root was still showing that it was connected but "Waiting for device".  I had to close Kingo Root and restart it and then it would go through the whole process again.  I did the a total of five times before giving up (sometimes a message would pop up on my phone saying that a certain program was trying to run but that Google advised against it, but I let the program run because I thought it was part of the rooting process).

After some Googling someone said that he couldn't get the latest version of Kingo Root to work but that an old version, V1.1.0, did work for him, so I downloaded that version and tried that.  This time it was very different, with my phone downloading something from my PC and then the phone rebooting and some sort of rooting program starting with lots of text scrolling up the screen.  My phone then rebooted again and started up normally.  The Kingo Root program on my PC said it had finished but Root Check said that my phone still wasn't rooted and now I had half a dozen apps on my phone with strange names in Chinese characters.  I removed those apps and my phone seems to be working ok (hope it didn't install anything nasty, running Malwarebytes now).

So what do I do now? Is Samsung Knox stopping me? Is Know even on my phone, how do I tell?!?

I'd prefer some sort of one-click and let it do it's thing rather than too much fiddling around. I have no experience with Odin and don't have the Android SDK installed.