This was totally my fault, and anyone else who does it should have to go through what I did. However, I messed up the upgrade from 2.15 core 86 to 2.17.1. Here is how I did it.
I had core 85 installed, and did the upgrade to core 86. However, I did not reboot (I did it from the command line and there was no notification there that a reboot was required). I then immediately made the change to 2.17.1.
On reboot, the machine did not come up. Unfortunately, I had it set up for scon, and my serial cable is at a client site, so I was not able to see an error message. If you want, I can set up the same scenario and see if it happens again after I get my serial cable back from them (tomorrow).
Again, this is a very rare circumstance, and I have no debugging information at this time.
Rod