OK. This was very helpful. It seems like it is a display issue, so I hooked my laptop up to an external display of older vintage and voila! It looks normal. So the problem is only when I am trying to work on my laptop display, which I would like to be able to do, but it is not the way I normally work when at home (I am traveling at present).
Maybe 5.9 will include a way for RT to talk to UHDs. Thank you, thank you all for the help in getting this resolved or at least worked around. SN