I think I have the answer.  It worked for me when i signed-in to post this reply.

First of all, the response from the Sony Community website is slow - painfully so; this makes me believe that all is not well with my userid and/or password and I repeat the process - this prolongs the time before I get a response. But no, the answer seems to be that you have to hit the <enter> key for both the userid and then again for the password for security checks to be made.  This seems archaic and counter- intuitive to me; I would have expected that when I hit the <Sign In> button that is when it would perform it's security checks for both userid and password.