Thank you for the info ... in researching that ... I came across this youtube link: Where's my UBUNTU? Windows 10 update killed my dual-boot GRUB.1 minute solution. - YouTube
In it he suggests opening a command prompt as an administrator and running this command:
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi
then restarting ... THIS WORKED ... everything is back to normal - thank you for pointing me in the right direction. Cheers!