SOLUTION:
Dear Windows Users,
Don't use TextPad to code for UNIX.
Heh.
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The slightly longer story:
The reason for the #-1 Invocation Limit was because the upped limit wasn't being read by the game on startup/restart, but parts of the netmux.conf file were.
The reason for that wasn't because of permissions (my #1 guess) but eventually remembering that @ZombieGenesis was using winscp to upload the edited file, which means editing on Windows, which means using Windows-encoded returns.
So the older parts of the file were being read by the game fine, but the things added new were not.
NP++, UNIX-style EOLs, and viola, everything is running smoothly.
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ZG: Remember to un-alias 'm' from 'page'.