On further investigation, I realized that for a loong time in both lxqt or openbox - I had 2 plank icons in my plank. I right clicked on them (for the first time - plank just worked) and removed the one that did not have options to configure plank. Things improved.
I still have a .~/.config/plank/lxqt and a .~/config/plank/dock1 (dock1 has settings for the simpler openbox environment). No real problems seen presently with the duplicated configs. I will see what happens when lxqt changes over to the xfce4 windowmanager.
I really liked openbox, but it is not like I have a ring on my finger or anything with it.