Hi Bill,
I don't understand how the versioning feature could impact this...as you said, it's not used by Communities & Collections. It's also odd to me that this odd behavior would *only* impact Communities & Collections, as it should also impact Items if the versioning configuration was to blame. Something isn't adding up here.
I can verify the I tested on my end with the default settings of "org.dspace.identifier.VersionedHandleIdentifierProvider" and everything is working. The Demo Site also has this default setting in place and it's working fine as well:
https://demo.dspace.org/ (Demo is running 8.0, but this area of the codebase shouldn't be significantly different between 7.6.2 and 8.0)
I'm really at a loss as to what the cause could be. My only thought is to try to reinstall 7.6.2 (maybe some old config or cached JAR is causing issues?), or you could try out a 100% vanilla installation (of 7.6.2) on your local machine just to verify for yourself whether that works or not. My suspicion is that is likely either a configuration issue, a conflicting JAR or a customization causing issues.
Possibly the only way to determine if that suspicion is correct is to try out a completely vanilla installation (with no existing data) and see if it works. If that works, you could then trying your local codebase (again with no existing data) to see if that works. If it doesn't, it's something in your local codebase or configs (and you may want to diff them with defaults to see what's different). If it still does work, then maybe there's some sort of issue at the data level (I think that's less likely here, but I could be wrong).
Tim