Thanks for the replies.
I have had the green button 'on', hence my confusion. Toggling it made things much worse
I decided to do a clean install, & that seems to have altered the behavior in my favor for now.
I will need to start working on filters tho as things changing as they have does make a mess of a lot of literal exclusions & inclusions which were ok before.
...& to hijack my own thread, I'm still seeing the queue halt when a 'dead' post is met.
If the problem file isn't deleted or paused NBP will hang on it all day.
& The queue will only continue after a restart of NBP.
It will not advance automatically to the next 'live' post without these conditions being met.
I'm sure it would skip ahead after x retries originally.....