Which is to say, I have not the slightest clue what fixed the problem
For the past several months, I've had varying degrees of failure in accessing my BitShares account, directly, or through OpenLedger.
I've pissed and moaned about it, but no-one's responded, even to laugh at my quandary.
But my wild guess is that something pretty serious must have happened, that others have had this same serious problems that produces a failure to sync with the API server.
Then I tried the wallet.bitshares.org address the error started to throw at me recently- it seems to work fairly consistently to grant access to accounts, and of course the DEX is easily accessed, when the problem still exists trying to logon through the home page or even view the exchange.
I still don't understand the problem of not being able to view the exchange from the home page.