Well, seems I don't have to sweat this anymore, as my 1 yr old niece through her "overly active" curiosity, ensured that I will be needing to buy a new SSD and having the insides of my T-420 "blow dried"! LoL!......Thanks to all for the advice. And thank goodness for 2TB USB drives and my rigorous backups schedule! (although I think I'm just gong to nix all the customizations I had on there and will go with a plain vanilla install and keep it that way!...I mean don't get me wrong the Gnome extensions are awesome and all that ,but I have a feeling SOMETHING caused my kernel to get stuck to begin with!) Plus I get to install a fresh copy of F29 on my system!....so no more seeing the fc27_x86-64 kernel in my boot up screens!
Cheers!
EGO II