I spoke with an Adobe support agent, that specializes in assisting After Effects users. He remoted into my computer, looked around, force quit some of the Creative Cloud stuff that runs in the background. Nothing changed.
He was able to watch me recreate the problem continuously. I was also having a issue with the spacebar caching frames but not playing back. The NumPad 0 still deleted layers or keyframes when selected.
We uninstalled After Effects through Creative Cloud App and deleted preferences when prompted by the uninstaller. Re downloaded and re installed.
Now my spacebar works correctly but the NumPad 0 still deletes layers…….