Hey all, thanks for EVERYTHING!
Here's the deal:
Started at 9:00 AM today. Drained the fluids & got her up on the lift. Got to looking underneath the bike for missing parts or something else that might be wrong (like a huge, gaping hole in the tranny case). Nothing but road grime & a little bit of oil build-up from a very slow drip coming from the primary.
I gave the service manual the once-over last night, kinda like cramming for a test. At least I had a battle plan for today. Off came the foot boards & the exhaust. I opened up the primary, not sure if I needed to monkey around with the adjuster, or if I'd need to yank the compensating sprocket & rear sprocket/clutch assembly. At least the adjuster was in tip-top shape (there's over 50,000 miles on the bike, remember). So, I thought I'd wait to remove the ENTIRE primary until it was absolutely necessary. Moved to the transmission top cover. I figured I could see whether the spring was indeed fragged or not. Well, the spring was intact, and where it was supposed to be. I took the opportunity to inspect the gears as best as I could for anything glaringly wrong. Everything looked fine, except that the shifter pawl didn't look quite like I remembered the picture in the service manual showed. So, I dug back into the book, just to make sure, and sure enough, it needed adjusting. The manual said I was going to need "Special Tool Number such-and-such", but I figured I could make do with standard tools. All it took was an 11/16 box-end wrench for the lock nut & a 1/4 open end wrench for the adjuster. When I shone a flashlight down between the primary & transmission case, I saw what I had been looking for all along. The shift lever was indeed coming off the end of the shaft! How perfect...look for the worst-case scenario, and end up finding the simple solution! Well, the bolt was tight, so it's not a case of it simply coming loose. I figured that 13 years of shifting had just slowly worked it off of the shaft. So, I got that taken care of, and decided that I may as well have a look at the cam chain shoe. Never did that before, and since I hear of people needing to replace those regularly, and I had not, I was expecting the worst. But it wouldn't go away if I ignored it, so why put it off? I was surprised to find that it was in remarkably good condition, but I'm replacing it anyway. 50,000 miles and it looks this good, I'm not switching to gears at this time.
I spent the rest of the afternoon adjusting the primary chain widget, adjusted the clutch, inspected the brakes, adjusted the drive belt tension & alignment, all that sort of thing. Depending on who's open tomorrow, I'll go get new gaskets, spark plugs, exhaust gaskets & flange nuts, fluids & an oil filter. Maybe I'll splurge and get a new K & N air filter while I'm at it....

Thanks again, all-y'all!

 

Thanks forthe update, Sometimes we never hear the outcome.

 

Glad you found it! This is why I'm such a evo nut!! I love
The simplicity!!