Thanks for the info on logs & Portainer passwords. I've saved both for future reference as needed.
For the Portainer problem I didn't rely entirely on AI (typically use it as a last resort), and remember looking through docs and they were so daunting that I was afraid to to mess with setting up yet another docker to fix a docker that's causing trouble (swallowing the spider to catch the fly).
For example, resetting a Portainer password is not difficult. From the Portainer docs:
Looking at it now I still wouldn't really know what to do. I see a line that says "you'll need to mount the Portainer data volume." Ok, what is the data container volume and how do you mount it? It also mentions something about a "bind mount," which is also Greek to me! I think one of the frustrating things about Docker-related stuff is that so often the instructions say to do a thing but not how to do it - or even provide links to how to do it if they don't want to break the flow of the main instructions. A glossary would certainly be a handy thing. Yes, maybe with enough effort I could have painstakingly looked up each of those mysteries, but it didn't seem worth the additional frustration to use a thing advertised as making things easier, when I could much more easily paste in whatever "docker run" command was provided.
I had also looked via Google (which was a major rabbit-hole source), and the Reddit Portainer sub, which was aimed at people who'd been using it forever and had no help for beginners. I didn't get a reply to my post there looking for help.
So I'm still not convinced to give Portainer a try, but will definitely use the command to get full logs next time I need them.