On the unity forum, somone sugested going to the octane settings (is a top level menu in unity, the click on version control, then go one level back. This worked for me, in that rebooting and or anything else I wasn't getting the load. So I am now 2017.3 unity with version 1.1.0.1207 . I btw wasn't ...

Xhed wrote:We haven't found any compatibility issues with 2017.3

I retried, had a error. Then re-installed and its all working fine. No idea what the problem was, but your right, so far 2017.3 is not an issue.

Any update on this? Wasn't obvious why things were not working, until I found this forum. I btw need 2017.3 for the new cloth and fbx support, so can't start my next project without this.