Well, I'm embarrassed to say that I did skip the rest the PRAM and SMC step in doing all the debugging and this I seem to dimly recall I had this problem before, but some configuration file was deeply messed up and just doing this reset did the trick. I ran for a day in Safe mode (which is actually very functions fyi, nothing like Windows safe mode). And then just returned back to regular mode and everything seems fine.

Duh!!!!!!