XRDP sending login information to login manager - failed display 0

Hey all. This was all working perfectly before I did an upgrade / dist-upgrade. So, Since the server sits behind me physically I promptly forgot about it-to busy at the time.
Got laid of work and have all kinds of time now:-)

To make things more complicated, the old 10yr old system (Dell XPS) that was running my website died on me. So, I removed the SDD from it and shelved it for about 2.5 months.

I got a 10 day warning to renew certbot, so installed the website SDD into this newer PC (Alienware R4).

Of course I had no video or keyboard/mouse or whatever else. So, booted into recovery and started to fix stuff. Deleted any lock files found in /var/lib/apt and /var/libdpkg

ran dpkg --configure -a until all resolved - done
ran apt clean
ran apt-update --fix-missing - all good
ran apt upgrade and dist-upgrade
reboot and back at the desktop.
everything working fine, including my website (LAMP/Wordpress)
certbot renewed just fine well within the 10 day limit.
I go back to my desktop and sometime/days later I attempt to access this linuxbox using xrdp (installed before the PC move) and sesman connects OK - sends login info to login manager and then fails to logon. I am using the correct password because it was preprogrammed into the windows 10 RDP connectoid. I can ping the linux from windows and vice versa.

I have tried some things on my own starting with systemctl service xrdp stop / then status to make sure its not running / then apt purge xrdp xorgxrdp.

Reboot. Reinstall from scratch and test. Same thing.
Well, I removed and re-added firewall rules, ensured snort wasn't interfering by shutting it down and clearing the alerts and blocks.
I looked at startwm.sh and tried the two following configs:

#test -x /etc/X11/Xsession && exec /etc/X11/Xsession
#exec /bin/sh /etc/X11/Xsession
startxfce

and the default

test -x /etc/X11/Xsession && exec /etc/X11/Xsession
exec /bin/sh /etc/X11/Xsession
#startxfce

I changed Xwrapper to read: allowed_users=anybody instead of allowed_users=console

I added vim /etc/polkit-1/localauthority.conf.d/02-allow-colord.conf
with contents:

--------------snip------------
polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
if ((action.id == org.freedesktop.color-manager.create-device" || action.id == org.freedesktop.color-manager.create-profile" || action.id == org.freedesktop.color-manager.delete-device" || action.id == org.freedesktop.color-manager.delete-profile" || action.id == org.freedesktop.color-manager.modify-device" || action.id == org.freedesktop.color-manager.modify-profile") && subject.isInGroup({group}"))
{
return polkit.Result.YES;
}
});
-------------------snip---------

seems like no matter what I do I get login failed display 0.

Again, this all worked just fine before the upgrade/dist-upgrade.

I WOULD LIVE someone to be able to help me out. I've been reading/experimenting with fixing this for about 7 days now, about 6-8hrs per day, I am well and truly stumped.