Indeed, the culprit appears to have been the emacs-ess package, which
was creating issues even with it not being called.
Unfortunately, for me, emacs-ess was the main selling point of emacs,
and with that rendering emacs unusable, it appears that I will have to
move on to nvim which has a good R interface.
Many current RStudio users, (like Jenny Bryan) used to be ESS users!
I'm a member of that ESS to RStudio crowd, but my use case hs changed from
writing R code to maintenance, and many colleagues working in enterprise
environments where access to linux is command-line on data center servers, but
they do have R-studio-server and Jupyer that can be used with web browser in
Windows.