Update-
Spent half a day on the phone with vmware yesterday on this issue. We re-tried most of the steps already performed above, including confirming the hostd agent is running on the host, replacing the host certificate, attempting to connect the host to two different vcenters and probably something more... none of which generated the desired result. I have forwarded the vmware and host log bundles for review and they will get back to me today or tomorrow. Meanwhile, one of the suggestions was to upgrade vcenter to the latest version and see if this fixes the problem. Will be testing this today in my lab environment, where I have yet another host exhibiting the same issues.
Elmars