found it.
I figured it had to be something to do with access rights somewhere, so I went to the settings and checked the Security and Privacy->Password settings. I didn’t see anything odd there, but while I was in, I switched to automatic login and reset.
Guess what… that solves it… My projects now happily build and run and can be executed from my VisualGDB debug command.
To double check I set auto login back to off and sure enough my VisualGDB failed again
So the secret is… ensure you have automatic login, with your matching ssh username
Bizzare issue…Dunno why this is happening, but very happy I resolved it.