In this case, "silence is golden."
Success. DISM completes and reports no problems. SFC completes and reports no problems. I've imaged the good installation.
A few annoyances but minor and ok. All of my icons are gone in my desktop. I have about 100 icons carefully arranged in groups. I'll have to manually repopulate those one-by-one as get time. I just figured out that for some of them if I right-click it and make it 'medium' and then back to 'small' it rebuilds the icon.
I have one issue. I now have extra partitions on the C drive. Look at this and tell what I can delete, merge, etc., to clean up.
Other than that I think I'm OK. My main programs launch and the licenses are intact. One of them had me 'reauthorize' but did not complain that I had too many activations.
I had one big scare. When I rebooted after reattaching my drives and devices, the logon screen did not appear and I saw spinning circles for longer than normal, about the time my stomach hit bottom, the logon screen appeared. Dodged a bullet there.
And, it only took 430+ posts. However all was not lost. I think we figured out what worked and what didn't and next time, given the annoyances were small, I'd go straight to 'repair install.'