Dear ricklinux,
I sincerely apologize for not responding to you sooner but, right in the middle of our conversation, my wife called me to come to lunch (and one must always obey one’s wife - A Happy Wife is a Happy Life) and, after lunch, I was told that I had a lot of errands to run and some other chores in which to engage.
That said, this morning I “fired up” this Acer computer and tried the Print Screen key as you suggested. The “Magic SysRq” key function worked perfectly. I don’t know why I hadn’t tried that for myself before asking about it. I do find it odd that Acer would label this key only PrtSc and not have SysRq printed on it too. Thanks for your suggestion.
As for my other problem, I found the answer myself, also this morning. I went back into the BIOS and saw an option Function key behavior. I hadn’t noticed this before. The default was Media key. The other option was Function key. When I chose that option, the function keys worked perfectly.
I suppose that I should have experimented much further before bothering people here with my “problems” and, for that, I also apologize.
I do very much thank all who have responded to me and, especially, to ricklinux whose advice pointed me in the right direction.
Lawrence