Hi Tom,
Found the issue. The configuration file no longer had the following set:
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);
Putting that back in helped. I did lose some settings in the Customizer like the footer credits but that is easy to put back.
Thought I would share that in case anyone else comes across that. The webhost had done a file edit to comment something out and must have been accidentally deleted perhaps.
Thanks,
Nancy