catch exceptions and fix some vars

resolve an issue where autorestart wont catch an exception leading to the global exception handler preventing restart.

resolve another issue where custom random_reauth_delay value was ignored

also cleaned up some of the auth_ vars... some more cleanup should be done at some point because many other methods pass the timeout, safe mode, and tries values up the call stack when not really necessary.
I have reverted this entire block. We cannot simply quietly overwrite given arguments to a function. This adversely multi-master, for example. @steverweber please let me know how the previous behaviour was causing a problem and we'll find a better place for this logic, please. Thanks!