Thanks Vince for the tip.
That did not provide a solution, but it did cause some other behaviour. I think you are on the right track. I cleaned the folder and I started seeing the audio waveforms appear for the linked in clips as the info bar was telling me it was conforming them. The only problem is that they all pulled a ~3 second audio sample from one of them and repeated it endlessly.
Something is not linking correctly. I rendered them all last night, so I expect them to work now as true avi’s instead of the links.
Maybe it will work next time.
Pauley