OK, after 3 tries I got CentOS 6.6 installed (don't ask). Now something very odd is happening. My regular user, me, can not login to level 3 without odd errors.
I get /home/<username> not found when it's there and setup with correct permissions -- well here I am using it in run level 5 just fine!
So, my normal user is left logged in at /root. Even if I move over to the correct /home area and then try startx (my preferred way of doing business), it does NOT start. Tries all kinds of things, and finally fails.
My next step is to take a look at the gnome startup script vs startx to see if I can figure out the differences if no one has encountered this before.
ps. the partitioning tool DID work, but a LOT of futzing with this. I finally did end up with combining my old /opt and /usr with /, so hopefully I won't run into any issues later.