The issue was related to the database server platforms... all the previous MySQL servers I had hosted on were Windows resident but the new MySQL (MariaDB) server hosting the database is a UNIX based server.
Seems the default for Windows systems is to create table names in lower case and to not care about case when it comes to using table names in queries, etc. UNIX based implementations of MySQL are case sensitive (just like the OS.)
I added "lower_case_table_names = 1" to the my.cnf on my server under [mysqld] and restarted the MySQL server daemon. The query that was failing before is now completing so I'm going to assume that I'll be able to make the switch the next attempt (which will be at an off time after bringing the database current again on the target server.)
BTW, here are the possible values/behaviors of the lower_case_table_names from the MariaDB site (which should be the same for MySQL implementations of course)...
If set to 0 (the default on Unix-based systems), table names and aliases and database names are compared in a case-sensitive manner. If set to 1 (the default on Windows), names are stored in lowercase and not compared in a case-sensitive manner. If set to 2 (the default on Mac OS X), names are stored as declared, but compared in lowercase.
