Right. Did the plugin reactivation, and Buddypress “is” the culprit.
I screwed around with the URL settings through the Dreamhost.com admin panel, (there are some options to add/remove the www.) ‘before’ I installed Buddypress. At this time, and after I installed Buddypress, I didn’t have a redirect issue.
Then I changed my Dreamhost settings to accept both Http:// and http://www. as equals (instead of changing whichever it landed on), and then had tried “reinstalling” Buddypress. At that point, the redirect loop was incurred.