Well, I tried Restore to factory settings and that did not work. I even pulled the peripheral hard drive off my MacBookPro, installed BIAB 2017 directly onto the MBP and I still get the same "Error: Cannot save to root of drive" - ALL MY OTHER PROGRAMS, Word, Excel, Photoshop will save files - it is just BIAB - and not it is BIAB 2015, 2017, 2017, on the MBP, on the Mac Mini, whether trying to use from a peripheral drive or installed on the computers themselves, all thing BIAB for "saving" or "naming" are just toast.
Whatever this is killed BIAB on all the computers for all BIAB versions.

I talked again to Apple Support - they have never heard of anything like this.

Even reinstalling Sierra OS did not help.

I can't wait for PG.music to open in the morning but I have a sick feeling they are not going to be able to help either. I am thinking something deep has happened to my root systems in both Macs - I could zero foam the drive in the older Mac but you cannot zero format SSD's. If the problem is down deep in the lower levels of root/Hades then I am never going to be able to run BIAB on my MBPro - and I'd be scarred to buy another expensive SSD until the "root" cause of this problem is found.
Been working with Macs and BIAB since the earliest days and have never dealt with a problem like this.