Steven Zahm@ Graham
Apologies for the misunderstanding. I was under the impression that a redirect loop occurred when deactivating Connections. Hence when it worked, I did not inspect further.
I ended up spending all morning on this … it was not a Connections bug or issue. In fact, the opposite, which makes sense considering Connections is not activated. When Connections was activate it was actually correcting the redirect issue which is being caused by another plugin or maybe the theme.
The redirect loop was affecting only the front page/home page, all other pages worked just fine. This discovery then lead me to the solution. Connections has a bit of code which disables a core WP “feature” which can cause redirects on the site’s home page. Something else, not Connections is causing this redirect.
To solve this for you, I installed the Code Snippets plugin and added a code snippet which includes the few lines of code from Connections which disables the front page redirect thus fixing the redirect loop while Connections is not activated/installed. Really, this is simply a bandaid solution. You probably should invest time into investigating the source or the redirect loop.
Hope this helps!