lost ability to manage colors in gp premium

The issue here is that WP switched their color pickers to <button> elements in WP 4.9, however they're still using <a> elements on your site.

For example, here's another site using WP 4.9: https://www.screencast.com/t/h6ocNneb6

And here's your site: https://www.screencast.com/t/rWAo1r0o

Perhaps you're using a plugin which is keeping the old color picker markup? Do you have a fresh install somewhere on the same server you can test with?

You need me to create a downloadable duplicate of my site? ( clone site )

ok so it's a plugin that has a bug. I'll disable one at a time until I find it.

Not necessarily - just a guess. Something must be changing the markup.

I was suggesting throwing up a quick test site with only GPP installed on WP 4.9, just to see if it's something specific to this one site or not.

I just checked about 5 sites using GPP 1.5.3 and WP 4.9 and couldn't reproduce the issue.

WpBakery just updated the other day. I'm going to disable that for a minute and see if that was it.

It's Massive-Addons. https://codecanyon.net/item/massive-addons-for-visual-composer/14429839

That's something they will need to fix. Check the comments here: https://codecanyon.net/item/massive-addons-for-visual-composer/14429839/comments