Problem(s) Encountered:

At some point I used the caps lock key, and somehow the workstation got stuck in caps lock, no matter what I did.  Fortunately I wasn’t typing on it much, and could work around using the shift key to type lowercase characters when needed.  This also happened to Elisabeth Newton and I when I was helping her get started, but now I don't remember how we cured it!  After I closing I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the VNC, but it that didn't fix it.

Solution:

I logged out of mdm13ws1 then logged back in.  This corrected the caps lock issue.  This solution should NOT be tried by the observer as one must log in as root to get back to mdm13ws1 allowing VNC connections as user obs13m.  Once back in, all software was set back up and systems tested.  Should be good to go.
Lesson here:  don’t use caps lock via VNC connections to linux boxes.