Nope - it's OK, sorry for the scare … completely on me. My apologies!
It's due to this issue ... https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=114345.0. I never would have guessed that a shellcmd (that doesn't exit) would block a bunch of services, but it does. That was a surprise finding. Struggling to try to run a command at startup (even in the background).
Again, sorry!