Thanks for your reply.
My internet conection is currently 50Mb, so I know it's not that. Typically a bandwidwith related issue is not going to cause an app to quit during the very earliest stages of launch (no bandwith is actually being used). Port issues, possilbly. Addionally, Teamviewer had always worked concurrently with SL Viewer (and all TPVs) in the past...this problem appears unique to SLV2.7.1. The connection was not active at the time... just sitting idle in the task bar. Using some ram / CPU cycles for sure, but not really any bandwidth.
Funnily enough, after posting my solution I saw another post about Pheonix's new version of Firestorm. It works great and similtainiously with Teamviewer (plus the zillion other benefits).
So in the end SL was my viewer of choice for as long as it took me to do a forum post! ~Linden FTW