Lol--now that I understand the reason for the advice, the path forward is quite obvious. Thanks for the link. Problem solved.

Do you get a message near the top of the screen that says something like "Welcome to Standalone Raspberry Pi"? If so, you are in "safe mode" aka "recovery mode". Something is making you Pi boot abnormally. Is anything connected to the gpio pins (specifically pin 5 of connector P1)? I am also having...