Midi keyboard trouble

[Bookerv12]

Hi,
Helping a friend.
We are both on PT 2018 HD Native Mac.

He just upgraded to 2018.
I have been there for a couple of years.

After he upgraded, his midi keyboard will not play through PT.
I tried on my end, and it was immediately recognized and an instrument track gets controlled by an M-Audio USB keyboard.

Identical setups, yet his will not pass midi control.
We are both simply creating an instrument track, instantiating "Mini-Grand".
We are both setting the input on the Inst track to KeyStation 88-port 1-all channels.
Mine fires up right away and I get levels on the meters and "Mini-Grand" plays fine.
His, after setting up the input, gets no levels in PT.
The midi info up on the transport shows what chords you are hacking out and all, but no levels or midi input on the inst. track.

Things we have tried:
We set up Audio Midi on the Mac identically.
The Keystation shows up fine.
When we test action in Audio Midi, it shows Midi action.

The keystation shows up as the input on the Inst track.
When I put the track in record, all works as expected.
When he does, nothing.

Last night, I had him trash prefs using PT Prefs.
He set up a test session with one inst track.
Yay! It started working.
Today, he created an inst track in a session, and the keyboard does't work.
We tried a few things, and no new tracks work with the keyboard.
Strangely enough, when he goes back the test session we created last night, it works.

Any ideas?
This is just stupid.