wifi kill won't stay off

My system has been stably running 16.04 with a USB wifi adapter for about a year. The other day (after the big security fix fest updates) after the rebooted system (after said updates) had been running for a few hours, it suddenly started getting absolutely torents of errors. It flooded the log for a bit over 3.5 hrs with varying kinds of errors but in the end, there was a message from NetworkManager that said "manager: WiFi hardware radio set disabled".

I have tried that adapter in other systems and it works fine. Further, I have a couple other adapters known to work but I can't get ANY of them to run.

I look at "rfkill list all" and it lists one adapter with soft block set to YES. I do an "rfkill unblock all" and now it says it is no longer blocked but I can't get to the device. The device doesn't show in ifconfig's list. It just doesn't seem to exist even if I restart network-manager. So I do a reboot. The log shows that it finds a rfkill switch at some convoluted path in /sys/devices and blocks the wifi all over again. When checking rfkill list again, I see the soft block reestablished. So somewhere (systemd?) there is a record of the block that is used to refresh the blocks that rfkill controls. I just don't know where.

Wifi to a hotspot is the only networking I have (hence why this report is not full of log examples) so this box has no internet either.

When I put a different adapter in there, there was no kill switch found but in the end, network-manager disabled wifi with the new adapter too. No idea why.

I'm at wits end trying to get wifi restored on this box. Would appreciate any pointers to a solution and/or a list of any log info needed - not sure if any is needed to answer my main question.