Think I have this solved!
Dumb user error (and a potential area of improvement on X-Plane)
It turns out, that in some of the X-Plane failures sub items, some sensors/electronics were FAIELD. That was saved in my default situation, so it would immediately fail the items on startup causing the errors above.
IT would be nice if the failures menu would auto-open (expand) the subcategories that had failures, and also on the top of the failures dialog, show if ANY systems are in failure state. I had to go into each one separately and browse through the list and found a few of the subsystems were failed. How they got in that state to begin with, I have no idea, but that is what happened.
I fixed all of the items failed and then re-saved the situation file, and now it works properly each time.
Thanks for your help. Hopefully someday, someone else may make the same mistake as me and find the answer here!
Take care.