Ok, I discovered a little more I thought was worth sharing. I did an update just before I noticed the problem. There was a Kernel update and apparmor was installed to satisfy a recommended dependency.
I removed apparmor and problem goes away, and I installed apparmor again and the problem returns. So for now I am up and running again, but in the future if apparmor becomes a strong dependency the problem will return. Maybe obfsproxy needs it's own apparmor profile, or the python profile has a problem? Regards Marc