Today is a good day... Apparently, plugin conflicts have been the source of my woes for sometime. I was having a different and separate issue regarding uploading attachments which I had traced back to a plugin.
That got me thinking that maybe this problem also has to do with a plugin. So, I disabled almost all of them - and sure enough Remote IMAP Accounts appeared... then going through and enabling one by one it appears that the plugin "moreuserinfo" is conflicting with the accounts plugin. If moreuserinfo is enabled, the remote imap accounts dialog will not appear in Account Administration.
Don't know if this is new or not, I never really used the accounts plugin before.
Thanks, for the work and the offer to help...