Yes I did solve it; just had to take a break and look at it with fresh eyes (think you already know this story)
The camera always connected, but the mount never did. Then I realized there is no mount connection because I am using ST-4. Once I ignored the mount failures and went to Internal Guider I found the camera was capturing. First night test - It worked great. Readily auto-selecting stars and guided pretty well considering.
I had been re-aligning the OTA’s dovetail. When done, I just did a fast PA with no 2 or 3 star checks and the Guider just worked, and fairly tight as I didn’t spend any time refining the PA.
Now.... on to new problems. Can’t get the DSLR app to work w/ Canon T7i ...... yet.