I fixed it!!!!! I'm going to try to explain what my issue was and hope I don't sound like an idiot in the process AND hopefully help someone else.

After much testing here was my problem. My mount (Eq6r-pro) for whatever reason was reporting to ekos the wrong position. Here's how I discovered it. I noticed the mount was reporting an odd position when the mount was clearly pointing somewhere else. When I first launched Ekos, instead of kstars showing the mount was pointing to the north star (as that's my parking spot for the mount), the reticle on the kstars was showing the scope to be pointing way off, I mean WAY off. Even when I synced the mount to the north star and thought the problem was fixed, when I quit kstars and re-lauched kstars, the reticle was WAY off again, but always showing in the same position. I don't know much about mounts, I'm aware they have encoders, but this kind of implies the encoders have a start point and that start point somehow got messed up. Out of pure frustration, I rummaged thru a box of telescope stuff, found the hand controller to the mount, plugged it in, did a factory reset. PROBLEM SOLVED! The meridian flip worked as planed last night. I'm guessing the flip wasn't working simply due to the fact the mount was giving ekos a wrong position.

As far as plate solving not working, this was fixed when I changed ownership of the index files to myself, instead of root. Now the new solver in kstars works VERY fast.

I thank all of you for your help on this matter.

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