So, I found what I guess you could call a "fix".  I would not claim to have an understanding of the root cause; but the bottom line is, the Rapture Session plugin and standalone interface are now working.
 
I took another look at the error information and decided to take it literally, treating it as a process permissions problem.
 
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Exception Information: The thread tried to read from or write to a virtual address for which it does not have the appropriate access.
 
I ran the Rapture Session standalone as Administrator and it worked right away.  It seems that whatever the DLL was trying to do was successful as admin.  Better yet, I can now run the standalone AND use the plugin in SONAR without running anything as administrator.
 
I don't know what to take away from this.  I'm guessing this all has to do with the registry in some way.  Following that line of thinking, the code was able to have its way when run as admin.  My assumption is that it was probably able to read/create some additional keys and subsequent runs work fine -- all conjecture.
 
I'm not certain if this was in some way an artifact of an initial setup gone wrong -- something specific to this machine's configuration, perhaps.  I'm a little concerned as to the state of my registry but the effects should be relatively narrow in scope.
 

Hi Brian
 
Thanks very much to take the time to provide a potential solution.
 
Oddly, I opened a 'New Project From Template' on Sonar and was able to also open Rapture Session. I then attempted to open RS in a current project and that was successful. Very strange, however I will keep your reply and suggestion for future reference.
 
Much appreciated!
 
Cheers
 
Keith