Hey guys… I GOT IT WORKING!!! at least eth0 on DHCP. And did I have to jump through some hoops. Let’s see if I can pidce this together and give you the necessary steps I took (leaving out the wild goose chases). BTW, I still get the “## Ip = Unable to parse ip . Please debug.” error on the Openhabian splash screen.
I have edited the etc/dhcpcd.conf:
interface eth0
static ip_address=10.5.0.10/24
#static ip6_address=fd51:42f8:caae:d92e::ff/64
static routers=10.5.0.1
static domain_name_servers=75.75.75.75 75.75.76.76 8.8.8.8
Then I edited /etc/network/interfaces:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
Rebooted…
Now my ifconfig -a shows:
inet 10.5.0.109 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.5.0.255
inet6 2601:204:c003:e0a0:ba27:ebff:fe76:3095 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x0<global>
inet6 fe80::ba27:ebff:fe76:3095 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20<link>
ether b8:27:eb:76:30:95 txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 1671 bytes 281495 (274.8 KiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 375 bytes 72815 (71.1 KiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING> mtu 65536
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 scopeid 0x10<host>
loop txqueuelen 1000 (Local Loopback)
RX packets 15 bytes 1038 (1.0 KiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 15 bytes 1038 (1.0 KiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
wlan0: flags=4098<BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
ether b8:27:eb:23:65:c0 txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
Now it just depends on how adamant I am about a static IP.
It appears from my reading that this has been a known problem. I’m obviously not the first person to come across this issue. It seems that the installation disables eth0 (I could be mistaken, but read “openHABian setup fails due to ipv6”
It appears to go over some of the issues. At any rate…
Thank you Danny and Wolfgang for all your help. You pointed me in the right direction. Now the thing to see is if I can repeat it… 
Todd