RESOLVED. (I think)
The server is a stock centos 6.5 machine with recent updates, I may upgrade it to Centos 7, but that is not a priority right now. However, I DID notice there was an available update to openssl 1.0.1e and nss-softokn-3.14.3, both of which I installed. THAT seemed to fix the problem, not sure why.
Anyway, thanks for the replies. This was an unusual problem in that I never saw an issue with previous versions of WP for these sites, it was only until I updated to 4.1 and/or www.ads-software.com required SSL only connections that I had the problem.