I upgraded to 7.2 and with two different night-time time lapses, the stars are bloated, like the frames are not completely in focus. These are Milky Way and comet time lapses. One was the same exposure the whole night, just one keyframe. In LR, I changed luminance noise reduction, increased exposure, and adjusted the curve a little.

LRTimelapse won't make your timelapses out of focus of course.
The only thing I could imagine, is that you might have activated "LRT Motion Blur" when rendering, which would of course "smear" the stars, which means cause some small trails. Turn of Motion Blur and render again.

I see this bloating before I get to rendering when I play the video after running auto transition. It is already distorted at that point.

So that "effect" is in the original images already? Check them in Lightroom please.
Is it possible, that you got condensation on your lens across the night?

Please provide an example image, the term "bloating" is something I have difficulties to understand.

The LR file is the first image, keyframe, in the time lapse and it is from LightRoom after I edited it and then saved the metadata. TL7 is the same image after running Auto Transition and viewing it in the preview window. All the images are unfocused after I run the AutoTransition. I have not yet run any deflicker but this is not a problem of flickering.

Thanks

As Gunther said, please post a original Image (best is a raw file). What you show us above are images totally out of focus and this is definitely not done by LRT.

If the raw images are sharp, you must have introduced some blurring when editing, like with Noise Reduction or negative Sharpen or some other editing.
Please start over from scratch, remove the sequence from Lightroom and in LRT do "metadata / initialize". Then do the editing as explained in the tutorials and instructions. Do some simple editing on the keyframes only, use the sync script to populate the edits and then see if the problem still persists.
Shouldn't you be able to get it going please share an original file that appears blurred including the xmp file. You can share via dropbox link or similar.

indeed the stars in the attached images are not even remotely sharp. straight out of the camera, no processing, they should be pinpoints. really basic questions…but i assume that you had: image stabilization off on the camera/lens… that before shooting you ++all the way in to 100%+ on live-view and manually focused, then either taped your focus ring or of course allowed no subsequent focus? sorry for the obvious questions