I’ve done a little digging and tried a few things…
-I tried the downgrade, followed by the update for mesa talked about here, but still have no luck. I can only get into i3 still.
-I did get lucky though and thanks to a well timed screen shot saw an error message that showed up briefly when trying to login to MATE.
Based on this I tried to edit ~/.config/monitors.xml with no luck and I also tried renaming monitors-v1-backup.xml to monitors.xml, still without luck.
Anybody have any other ideas about this? Other things to check? I get still get into i3, so I don’t think all hope is lost (it is just a VM though), but I’m not sure what else I can do. Thanks in advance.