Resolution -
To anyone who has the misfortune of running up against this issue ....
After a week of pulling my hair out, reading literally hundreds of posts on the internet and here on Rockettheme and following many, many leads down dark alleys ...
The answer was as simple as ....
The fields defined in the Plug In Manager called User Profile were different than what was on the form.... Date of Birth was set to "Optional" but was not on the form .... I set the field "Date of Birth" to DISABLED and it worked like a charm!
Amazing ... the amount of "misinformation" in Google posts is scary!
Be sure the defined fields in the User Profile plugin match the data entry screen that you are using in the Popup ... it gets confusing as in this case there is a Joomla, K2, Jomsocial and Easy Blog user module ... most just for syncing ... but
Allan