Well, another thing I tried is to run "wolframscript' (the command-line interface from a Terminal window) at the same time I had Wolfram running - but it won't let you and gives a license limit exceeded error window. if the limit were really 2 controlling processes, seems like Wolfram/Mathematica in one notebook would get one and there would still be one left over to do another "wolframscript" in a Terminal window - but that's not apparently possible...

So this whole license question is one rather obnoxious way of limiting what you can do in a really obnoxioius way. Seems like a whole lot of work to subvert using the software on your computer in ways that are not easy to anticipate. Wolfram sure goes out of their way to make it difficult to use rather than easy.

-bob