Success. Thanks for everyone's input, however I did find that there were a couple of interesting things I ran into:
In both the /includes/configure.php and admin/includes/configure.php, in addition to modifying the 2 and 3 lines as directed by the documentation, respectively, I also had to modify
define('DIR_WS_CATALOG', '/');
define('DIR_WS_HTTPS_CATALOG', '/');
as these are relative paths and they were pointing to the former subdirectory that it was in.
Additionally, I found that it worked better for me to change the session path first in the admin module, then do the other two files. When I tried it the other way, the program kept looping an error message every time i hit "save", by looking for the former subdirectory, and would not save it.
Don't know if I was doing this bass ackwards, but it's definately been an education:thumbsup: :thumbsup: