After posting last evening, I had intended to shoot some additional individual images, but I was tired and just went to bed. Waking up early, while it was still dark out, I though I would shoot some additional non bracketed images. Those images along with reading the responses - and thank you very much for your insightful comments - I decided to go back to ground truth (so to speak).
The image posted last night, was indeed initially out of Picassa. I just uploaded and clicked on the image and Picassa brought it up - as an initial quick look, and my heart sank from there - as in not again. Taking the least path of resistance, I saved off a JPG to resize in Elements. Normally, I use Bibble Pro, but I was lazy, and the EXIF was stripped.
So this morning, going back to something akin to ground truth, I spun up the Pentax Photo Browser (Silkypix) - taking a look at both this morning's take along with last night's. If I was going to complain again, I figured I need to use what they were going to use - i.e., what came with the camera. Clean! Then, I took a look at a whole series of images that lead to the first warranty repair - there was a lot of noise. After receiving the camera back - the first time, I did do a controlled shoot in the house across the entire aperture range (~60 frames), in reduced light and they looked great - problem solved. However, my images from Sedona, as I processed them, the images where it was getting to be dusk, the problem started creeping in with everything as I stitched the panoramas together (Autopano). I was using Autopano because it both stitched and stacked the bracketed images together (a quick stitch - just with the default parameters). Just clicking on the individual images (which brought up Picassa) just pushed the noise as was done in in the stitched panos. I did not go back to any of the other tools.
So yes indeed, as enoeske and Jewelltrail both graciously pointed out - Autopano and Picassa both pushed the exposures way too much.
Again, going back before the initial repair, both the RAW and JPG were both noisy. Now, where Picassa and Autopano finds noise with the RAW, the out of the camera JPGs are clean.
It appears that this episode has ended - happily. For a number of reasons, I have not been too terribly pleased with my software tools. I have been thinking of going to Lightroom 3 with a couple of their plug-ins. I think that this just will hasten my move.
I do have to say - Thanks!! I have my K20 back! - the out of the camera un-touch version of the initial image up above - too dark to post.