I have no choice but to “pursue it” until it is solved. The lawyers will be circling, soon.

To make things even stranger yet, the host provides a “test jig” where you can apparently run the program in a mode to flush out “500 Internal Server Error” messages ... and it works there, too!

Really, the only environment where it doesn't work is when I go to it through the web-URL.

P.S.:   When I dumped out environment-variables, after putting a SetEnv directive in .htaccess, I was mildly surprised to see that the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable that I was trying to set, had become REDIRECT_LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Why is that?