Aeotech Zstick Gen5. One switch is about 5 feet away; the other, about 35 feet. About to remove that one switch again and try one more time.
One more thing. Usually, after rebooting the RPI, both switches are ‘ready’, but as soon as I manually toggle one from the HA states panel, the one switch goes to ‘dead’ (after the toggle is executed). Not sure whether this helps triage.
Update. It is working now. I don’t know why, though. I rebooted one more time last night, just because, and it’s been working since. It is very slow, though. For example, I toggle the switch from the HA states panel and it takes up to 1 sec for it to change the actual switch; or, the switch on the ‘states’ panel might be ‘off’, I toggle it to ‘on’, it reverts by itself to 'off; and after a moment (I don’t think it takes more than 1 second) the switch actually turns on and the gui moves the switch’s image to ‘on’. I think I’ve seen a couple posts about slowness, so I’ll get researching that now.
There is a scheduled heal every night. Look up polling and intensity for Zwave devices.
Update. I think it is working ok now. Using OZWCP I saw that one of the switches was reporting dead (I could still toggle it through HA, but is was really slow). I removed it using OZWCP remove node button, did a factory reset of the switch in question, then added it again to the network using HA ‘add node’ button in the zwave control panel. After all this it seems to be working OK (fingers crossed). Thanks for helping me through the process.