After 2 days of wasted time, including 3 hours with support (who went up 3 levels of people I was not allowed to talk to directly), and support finally saying it must be a problem with my PC (tried this on multiple pc's in the office)....this is what I have found.  Hopefully it saves someone else serious wasted time/$.

Short version - Thunderbird will not work with 2022 even though they say it will.  Purchase and install the desktop version of Outlook ( you have to buy the subscription for the year for the entire office suite).  The outlook app that comes free with windows will not work either.  Personally I installed this as 32 bit (I had an old excel that would have had to been uninstalled so I figured I would go 32 for now)

Long version - 

I am trying to email checklists to clients.  We modify the checklist text and email to cover a yearly greeting/thank you and an engagement letter along with the checklist.  We do this as we find the check list useful (no one wants an organizer), and we don't want to use the mail for either the checklist, the yearly greeting, and/or engagement letter.  Anyway, the behavior is the same no matter what email task you are trying to accomplish via proseries.  This is just where it is an issue for me.

2021 and earlier proseries could email fine with Thunderbird.  During this process I learned it was an old version of thunderbird, so 32 bit.  No issues for many years all the way through 2021.

2022 proseries, this will no longer work, even though I tested 2021 side by side and that works.  Uninstall thunderbird and install 64 bit.  This breaks 2021 and does not fix 2022.  Yes I tried checking the 64 bit email setting, restarting proseries, restarting my machine.  We reinstalled proseries itself, etc.

I reinstalled 32 bit thunderbird and 2021 works again.  So if you wish to use thunderbird in 2021 and earlier, download and install the 32 bit otherwise, no luck.

As stated in the short version above, I finally spent more $$$ today (thanks intuit) and purchased and installed Office 365 with outlook as full desktop applications.  I did this at 32 bit.  I had to setup my work email (gmail organization) so there were a few hurdles there.  But once that was working I set outlook as my default email in windows, started proseries and both 2021 and 2022 work for sending emails now.

I am sure I forgot something, but hopefully that helps someone else, who can't afford to waste more time.