Well, I sucked it up and just completely rebuilt my solution from scratch and then replaced the web forms and code files from what I had already developed and now it finally works on the server.  Obviously there was some leftover crap somewhere (in the web.config probably) that was somehow referencing the SQLExpress database I started with.

I'm going to try and compare the old web.config with the new, but I have a feeling this is going to remain an unexplained mystery.