SOLVED!!!
I made the dumb mistake of not starting up in SAFE mode when trying to get to the root of this problem.
SAFE mode resulted in normal behavior, so I knew it was a plug in. I had a plug from WAVES on the mix buss, opened WAVES CENTRAL and there it was …“UPDATE AVAILABLE”…once I updated all was good.
Regarding the NO LICENSE FOUND error when double clicking a file in the Finder, it was because I had a demo of Nuendo that had just expired lol
Thanks to all!