Arrgh!
Something has gone wrong and nearly any action I take in the WordPress control panel causes the SQL server to quit. No error messages in the WordPress server log. No error messages in the SQL server log. No crash dumps. Web searches turn up stuff that is many years old.
Error check on restart shows that the options table needs to be repaired.
I’ve updated to the latest WordPress. No change.
Updated SQL server to latest for this system distribution. No change.
Manually removing funky looking options from options table. Maybe I’ll get lucky.
If not, then WordPress is off the web site for good.