Regarding Ernst Plüss's comment about watchdog DB logging errors
occurring while other, non-Drupal databases are active:  I could have
sworn I fixed that very problem in a patch to 4.7 core a very long
time ago.  In fact, I'm 99.99% sure I did.  It appears there may be a
regression, although I'm not sure which version of core of Ernst is
referring to here.

Thanks much for the reply, Larry.

..chris