I'm not sure where to put this among the many dozens of forums here. There is a bugs forum but the most recent post is years old.
I was interrupted with the "there are updates for boards.." message. I usually ignore those messages for a few weeks to let others find the problems. But for some reason unknown to me, I clicked on "Update".
When I updated the ESP8266 library, I got 30 messages similar to this:
I went to the boards manager and reverted back one version and all appears OK now.