Thank you for the tip to run as root. Over the weekend, I was using "sudo tvheadend -u hts -g video" and it still seemed to open it as user "steve" which is what I was logged in as. Since the system has a real root login, I logged in as root and ran "tvheadend -u hts -g video" and it worked!
I tried copying just the config file that I found under tvheadend, but it did not seem to bring over any of my setup. So, I just blindly copied the entire folder , its files and sub-folders. Then I changed the ownership and restarted tvheadend with the command string about. As tvheadend was starting, I noticed in the console messages that it was not finding the xmltv config as I had also configured that as user "steve". So, I copied that folder and its contents over and then again changed the ownership. For anyone else with a similar problem, below are the basic linux commands that I used. All were from from a root login.
It is still not running as a service, but since my wife wants a show recorded for tomorrow, that is a battle for another day. It is also issuing warnings and some spawn errors on startup, so what I did was not probably totally kosher.
ps aux | grep tvheadend
cp -r /home/steve/.hts/tvheadend/. /home/hts/.hts/tvheadend
chown -R hts:video /home/hts/.hts/tvheadend
cp -r /home/steve/.xmltv/. /home/hts/.xmltv
chown -R hts:video /home/hts/.xmltv
tvheadend -u hts -g video &