It looks like my problem came down to STAF permissions issues. I was fooled yesterday because I had also fixed a problem in my STAF.cfg giving the appropriate machine and default trust level. When I modified the STAF.cfg I killed the current stafproc and launched the startStafProc.bat from file explorer which gave it the proper maildomain0\Administrator privilege. When I rebooted, the problem came back and I didn't re-test specifically that stafproc privilege was proper.
Thank you for you quick response and feedback.