I think I may have seen the same .htaccess forum post. In the one I read, the file structure in .htaccess was messed up, missing some closing statements... or something like that. That made me check my .htaccess file... but all appears to be fine. AND... since I renamed the Better-WP-Security plug-in directory rather than deactivating or deleting, the .htaccess edits it made are still there. Disabling whatever scripts are in the plug-in gets the site running again, not deleting or editing .htaccess, so I'm not looking there any longer.
My biggest speed issue is the theme I'm running. It's a release candidate and doesn't have the fast code in it I'm told. Hopefully that will change, because the theme is great but the performance is sluggish. So there is a big delay before a page is rendered, but once rendering starts I have enough bandwidth to ensure a fast load.
The kyplex link is a good one and I will bookmark it for some later follow-up. You can never be too secure! Thanks again!