well, this has certainly been a log hard slog, but I finally figured it out. I'm not sure if I should kick myself or what.
I have been doing autodeploy in my lab and I basically rip it all apart and rebuild it .... frequently. What I did not do these last few time was actually remove the hosts from the cluster when I built new host profiles ... and I kind of wondered a bit why hosts where booing up and immediately going into the cluster. Well, that was the problem, they cluster thought they belonged, and added them, and that for some reason stops processing the host profile... the host profile does not get applied.
Fair enough, but it sure would have been helpful if somewhere, in the autodeploy, or sysylog or any log file, it would have said that's it, I'm not processing the host profile because of... but I don't believe that happens.
Oh well, I figured it out myself, patting myself on the back for perseverance and learning some more about autodeploy along the way!