@GordonR, your nudge was just what I needed! I had set up my root domain as a multisite with *.rootdomain.com. When you do it this way, you cannot set up a separate WordPress install. Your nudge reminded me to simply go to cPanel and set up commons.rootdomain.com specifically and create a new MySQL database and manually load the new DB info into the new /commons/config.php file and then run the WordPress install.php manually in the /commons/ folder. Very simple and easy and best of all, it works! Thank you very much!
