It seems like the new version automatically puts the following in after any serial communication: 
VMDPV_1|1_V

Is there a way to disable this?

Hi Tim,
I was getting a message like VMDPE (or similar), but I couldn't remember, so I intended to simply open the sketch and see the message and reply.  Unfortunately, or fortunately, I hadn't saved the simple version, so I was forced to face the more complicated sketch just to send you some feedback.  Long story short, in trying to reproduce the simple sketch, I made some tweaks and somehow got the whole thing working as expected and that message is somehow gone two.   
The original problem I had in comparing the input string from serial to a command string was I wasn't including the "\n" necessary to trigger the serial event to begin with. I'm not sure how that would have had an impact on the serial message output from VM, but I thought I'd just let you know.   
I did find a similar thread from many years ago which also suggested a corrupted serial message was to blame.  If this is the case, how can we avoid that?  What form of corruption?  Memory overflow?   
Considering all I changed was the comparison statement, I have a feeling, it wasn't random corruption, but user (me) created errors in the serial data.  I still haven't quite figured it out, but I got what I needed, so I'm moving on.   
As always, thanks for your support!
Brandon