Thank you Arun - I appreciate your help.
As soon as I add even one of those in my gradle file, it fails with this error during RUN TIME. It pulls and builds fine.
I also tried changing beta2 to beta1 as shown below and it still built but still shows the error shown further below
compile 'org.igniterealtime.smack:smack-tcp:4.1.0-beta1'
Umm, any chance you can share your project with a working login method? I know this is too much to ask but thought would save you time also. I made so many changes all over to try to make it work over the last month.. its hard to remember anymore. If you can't, totally understand - I will come back at it after learning some more about XMPP in general.