Well . . . . . after part of an afternoon fiddling about pursuing this on the 'net . . .

Turns out that the the new version of Outlook.com's servers don't jive with my current Outlook setup. Finally ran across a forum thread that discussed this. Interestingly enough, it was a post from a while back, but perhaps not all accounts affected at the same time?

Anyway, created a new account in my Outlook, is synced and pretty much all was good except for copying over some emails that were not included in the sync with Outlook.com. Of note is that my new account shows "MS Exchange" as the 'type' and now shows a local pst file location on my system.

Pft . . . . . more MS nonsense that people need to ferret out answers on their own . . . . . . . .