It took a few attempts and an intervention by a BEA webmaster but my login appears to be functional again. It no longer returns the authentication error however, it does report a username or password mismatch sporadically. If I manually retype both it takes a second, almost like the system is saying, "OH, that's what you said... sorry" and then logs me in.
From what I can tell the system is more sluggish in all things; login, browsing, search, image import, posting, uploads, etc. Not badly so, just enough to notice.
Thanks to whomever for the assist getting my account back to "nearly there."