replied on August 4, 2017
A case was opened with Laserfiche Support. The root issue seemed to be that the identity of the application pool serving the FormsConfig application did not have file system rights to update the configuration files for the Forms application proper. Once this was corrected, the configuration page had to write back to these files. To work around the fact that nothing changed, a dummy database had to be created for Forms to use, then switched back to the actual Forms database for operational use.
The misleading aspect was that no error was displayed or logged; we'll improve this moving forward.