Thanks, Alex.
A couple of additional comments... first, I didn't realize I had to 'insert' my attachment after uploading, so here's what I was looking at:
And just as a matter of further explanation of my troubles yesterday... I decided I would try to fix my field height / alignment issue and after trying to track done the exact elements to target with css, I decided to go back to 3.1.1, and it "seemed like" things were the same, so I was thinking well maybe something got left behind from 3.1.2, so I removed SCLogin altogether and reinstalled 3.1.1. And the homepage was fine, but on every other page, not only was the styling really, really screwed up, but clicking the button for the modal resulted in strange code appearing at the bottom of the page and, of course, login didn't work. And what was even more strange, I could set the homepage's bottom sidebar always visible login to be on all other pages and the top modal would then work. Wow, was I confused.
Well, I know this might be hard to follow, but like I said before, I've been trying to make sense out of all this. And I think I have. As said, I had turned on file caching in global config the day before I decided to fix the alignment, so in going back to 3.1.1, removing and reinstalling, recreating the modules, etc. with old cache files still in the mix, well there you go. Big lesson learned for me... seems caching should be off while still developing !!! And actually, I may never turn it on again
. At least until I understand it better.
Does this all seem to make sense to you?
And for now, I will stick with 3.1.1, alignment is perfect and I have no issues with jQuery/Bootstrap loading or not, so everything is OK. At least I do now know when the alignment got off track and how I got it back.