Mark thank you! The errors from the demo gave me something to dig into and I think I know what the problem is. It looks like php 5.4.7 may have some issues with this iconv() function. See this web link that shows some failing tests:
http://qa.php.net/reports/?version=5.4.7-dev
I just commented out the call to iconv() in the function ConverEncoding() in file String.php and let it fall through to mb_convert_encoding() and the demo now works and so do my applications.