In the end, it was an agent versioning problem.  I assumed incorrectly that since I was downloading directly from the SM menus on my fresh install that I was getting a recent version, and that had worked all along, but in fact it was giving back something older that was no longer compatible.  The confusing part, still somewhat, was that it worked fine for the brand new machine, eventually, without changing the network version settings as shown in the solution.  That must have been a fluke or I must have somehow donwloaded a higher number by some mechanism.   But after changing those settings to "Latest" and re-downloading and reinstalling the agent on my test machines, all was right within a couple minutes.  🙂   Thanks for the replies! Jeff ... View more