Can we see the apachectl -S output (you can munge to example.tld if needed)?
Frank, I was able to get all working by removing the md directory, updating the httpd.conf file to use the real v2 URL instead of the staging area, doing a hard restart, checking the logs and saw in the error log the system was waiting for a graceful restart, did so and all is well now.
I will definitely keep a note of my steps for future reference.
Thanks, and blessings to all!
-Tom