The hard drive was a SSD and 4.5 years old. I think that is the answer (things don't last that long these days). I have the machine on a lot. It showed up in a strange way with a good news story.
I first started noticing that the boot up (initially every week or so) would not complete. It would stop at various stages such that I had to hold the start button until it shut down and I then tried again when it always worked. The most frequent stage of lock up was both of my monitors would not go past an initial blue stage. Another was the one would light up and the other would take maybe a minute to light up. So this got progressively worse until it happened every other time I started the machine. I could see the pattern and decided to act before I could not even start the machine. I though it might be a deteriorating power supply since I had something like this happen before and that was the problem. I called a new service shop and over the phone he suspected the video card. I liked his analysis over the phone so I took it to him and upon watching the red light that shows disk activity going solid he then changed his mind and suspected the hard drive. I have two hard drives. The other is a regular spinning disk. He disconnected it and decided it was probably the SSD C:\ drive. He didn't charge for his 30 minutes of work analyzing and suggested I take it home and download a disk check software to be sure. So since the seagate software he recommended would only work on seagate I took the next most recommended which was HDDscan. It showed an error on the SSD which confirmed his analysis. He had actually ordered a hard drive for me but it was unavailable or something. The then he took it upon himself to call Canada Computers and found out a suitable drive was on sale for less than his cost and he told me to go and buy it. I verified what he said and decided to take it to him to get him to install it since he was so good. He charged me only $25.00 for everything he did. Sometimes we luck out :-) On the other hand he is smart and sees a good long range client and knows what is important (trust and not being greedy).
So after reinstalling all the software it fixed the problem. However the other video problem still occurs where one monitor lights immediately and the other takes a while. This occurs not too often. I suspect the video card is the culprit here since the new drive shows no errors and all software is fresh.
Anyway I guess the moral of the story is if something goes strange on your computer load down HDDscan and check the drive. It is free. This is where I found the disk check program.
https://www.lifewire.com/free-hard-drive-testing-programs-2626183I have also changed my image backup strategy. I take an image backup the day after I reinstall everything then maybe another one a bit later if I have changed something but the machine is still clean. I don't bother taking any other images since these could be images of a dirty windows (no point). So I now keep records of any softare I install and how I tweaked it. So when windows gets dirty and things go strange I go back to the first or second clean image and return it then apply whatever changes I made so I have a new up to date fresh install and I take a new image (I update my notes with these additional software install procedures). So now I will have probably 2 images (both clean). I take no more images (again there is no point since they are probably images of a dirty windows the longer time goes on). I follow the same procedure. Apparently Acronis can return an image to a different hard drive if you buy an add on. I am not sure this is a good idea. I think it is better to keep detailed notes of your install and when the drive finally goes (check it with HDDscan) then you get a new drive and reinstall everything (using your very detailed notes to make it easy). I had to return images 3 times on my drive. It is a fair bit of savings of time (15 minutes to return an image versus a day of reinstall if you have very good notes and some experience or 4+ days if you have a complex setup like my machine and it is your first time). AOMEI is a fairly good free drive image software. It works well on Windows 10 (not so good on Windows 7). A forum entry on this problem with windows 7.
https://www.aomeitech.com/forum/discussion/4246/on-win7-the-boot-disk-has-no-mouse-support-or-keyboard-supportA tip. When you take your notes do them in MS-Word outline format. You can collapse by groupings and you can copy paste and indent very easily. This time around I spent a day converting to this document format. It was worth it. I expect the next reinstall in 4.5 years will be a piece of cake.