Answering my own post:
It turns out the issue was with Dolphin When the Application ICON (.desktop) is in a folder, it appears that Dolphin ( or whatever file manager is selected)
controls what you do when it is selected.
Somehow in the confusion of pop-ups on this I managed to set the action on selection to something that doesn’t work right AND to make this the default.
I’m not sure what that action was, but turning the Confirmations on for Executing scripts/desktop files allowed me to select the right thing to do.
Richard Rosa