Thank you so much! I got it. Amidst some rather unladylike language as I manually deleted a whopping 193 spam posts. HOW I WISH I COULD UNLOAD A CAN OF WHOOP A$$ ON EVERY SPAMMER.
Oh, that bites (understatement). May the PC hardware gods smite the spammers with random sudden loss of internet connectivity that no amount of troubleshooting can fix.