I spoke too soon.Apparently the upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS whacked the spamassassin somehow and it was acting funny. There was no report template somehow and any SA call did not return a report.
All my attempts were failing to correct this, so not trusting SA, I completely removed and purged it and re-installed.
This corrected all the funnyness and it seems to be running now. I think my amavis debug may need to be run again.
