Modsecurity is turned on on the shared server I am hosted on. It can be whitelisted but that is all. I am not sure I would want that security feature disabled on my server or that it is the reason, since I have not seen any error messages implicating Modsecurity. I am going to do a clean reinstall. I downloaded Tiny Portal from tinyportal.net and the SMF software from simplemachines.org
Thank you for all your very professional efforts after the clean reinstall I will post a followup message as to how the ship is navigating.