by Myron Netterlund.
Good news. Ken, I took your advice and followed through with strict adherence to the file permissions. Then I returned to the list-item ADMIN view i had & forced the 'Standard' theme (normally empty by default) in Site Admin > Appearance > Theme settingsand the view snapped back into shape.
Never got to the Apache logs. Already lost several hours to the 'Purge all caches' switch, of which I'll probably avoid as log as i can into the future. Gun shy now on that 'feature'. I'd like to end this episode with some reasonable explination... but I'll leave that to the Moodle experts.
Thanks for your help today.