The Neopixel display has wonkyness that I can't  blame entirely on RF reflections.  I discovered Paul's non-blocking library which would go a long way to fixing some problems.   I tried running some of Paul's examples.  They were doing something but not what they were supposed to do.  I also saw his warning about using 5 V signals to drive the array.  I have been using the Adafruit library and did see some problems due to driving with 3.3 V.  Fortunately I have some spare LM339 comparitor sections running at 5 V that should work.  I also saw a non-blocking WS2812 library for RGB+W LEDs and relized my problem with Paul's example.  The good new is the RGB only rings are cheaper!  Paul is brilliant!