@Wheels564
Wipe - not
partition formatting - not
new 14.1 build - not
Gapps version - not
SIM card - not
Motherboard - not
I never suspected but you were right. The Gapps release was the problem. Not flashing Gapps allowed the LOS login and start the ROM. I arbitrarily grabbed 1/14 release from OpenGapps of my favorite mini version and it worked fine. The Google login is not playing well with the LOS login. It seems to be a regression bug in Gapps that generated the problem of the interface between the two.
Marginally related, We often need to do a clean flash back to stock. If you make a backup of a cleanly flashed stock, does restoring the backup work as well as a clean flash from scratch?