Update = Disregard my previous post as i believe my problem had too do with my ISP's or router cache* and not WP, Wordfence, or other plugin, code, conflicts, etc ...
note in total today i got locked out several times and it was after the initial time i got back in when i posted thread above thinking it had to do with Wordfence or WP but not so given the subsequent experiences ...
as fyi ... after i got locked out and unlocked back in, i then repeated the process of re-installing Wordfence, one by one with other steps and still locked out but this time my unlock steps of cleaning tables did not work ...
it was only after i asked another person in other office in other state to try with same login credentials that were failing on two of my three client machines, and when that person could log in i realized it was a network thing most likely on my end ...
so i uninstalled everything once again, rebuilt, repeated, rinsed, yada yada and then tried to login but still had issues on two of the three machines no matter what i did ...
luck would have it that the wife brought her laptop home tonight so after dinner i asked her to fire up her laptop, hop on our wireless network, and OMG - she had no problem logging in with the very same user credentials that were blocked on two of my internal machines ...
so once she got on, i then tried to re-log in on one of my erroneous machines and voila - now it could log in ...
which leads me to conclude that the router cache (even though i reset it and did hard reboot after power down) or ISP* was doing something ...
all of which kind of makes sense looking back as the WP login message was complaining about cookies not enabled which made no sense to me at the time ...
but if the ISP* or router cache was serving something sans cookies, well then okay, i now get why that message ... and i suspect that the wife's machine hopping on my network forced the ISP/router cache to adjust (to the new gal) hence now all my machines can log on ...
yeesh ... what a day ... cheers - chuck scott
*Maybe it was all an NSA thing that failed to clean up after its cache self in one of those nifty chip hacks they installed in Big Name High Speed Internet Provider Company modems and routers available at all the Electronic Big Box Stores Near everybody :>0