Sorted this early this morning. Needed to shut down the Pi and unplug the wifi dongle from the Pi and reinsert. After booting back up, the wifi hotspot responded correctly. I can only imagine it had to do with having re-imaged the micro sd card.
Still having issues with a restart through astroprint locally though - keep getting an error. But, when I need to, I just do a full shutdown and a hard restart on the pi (unplug and plug the power supply). Not ideal, but gets the job done. Interested in the cause, but not a big deal to me … not nearly as pressing as the open hotspot was.
Since I’m here, wanted to take a moment to thank the AP staff for all their hard work and the great software they’ve made available to us, for free no less. It’s really allowed me to take my printing to the next level with my Airwolf.
Thanks.