A Follow-Up to My Original Post.

Temporary Solution: Performed a roll-back installation of WordPress from version 4.5 to version 4.4-2. If anyone needs to know how to do it, here’s the YouTube tutorial I used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lX3E-qIpJM

Thankfully, it worked for me and temporarily averted a big problem. It seems that this tutorial has been very popular and very successful among a number of individuals who had website problems after installing WordPress version 4.5.

I’m still looking for a better, permanent solution to the issues I originally cited.

Jim