Well, guess what? It's now fine again, and working. We actually have Cable Comcast WIFI in-house ...
Here's my best guess - I was having a go-around (via email) with a tech team that wanted to take over my author website -- I noticed a little 'oddness' with email during that 'conversation' - back and forth emails. So, I deleted all his emails and all my responses to him, then dumped it out of the delete-basket. I also shut down twice and rebooted - same issue still.
No change - but that doesn't mean some kind of reboot doesn't take place with glitches in the IPS or server itself - I'm not tech smart at all but know everything has to recycle itself or renew itself regularly.
SO, after all those deletes, and a C:/ drive clean-up, and when I now opened the email and tried "reply", it now works as it should ... some of you tech guys probably know how this happened, but I'm just glad it's either fixed itself, or the deleting of that tech team sales pitch killed it... always puzzled when this stuff happens, because I never do anything different myself.