For anybody experiencing this I got it to work with the following...
-- I had a very old dev mode version which was getting updated for the past few years.. something must have happened to it during an update cycle in my environment.
--Deleted all Chrome installs from my Mac
--Re-installed the production release build for OSX
and everything works fine.. even speed tracer, which I thought would only work on dev build so now only have one Chrome prod release and everything is good.
Cheers...