I think it turned out to be my problem unless Epic just happened to fix something in their realm at the same time I worked on my end.
Anyway, I blew out my router firmware, reloaded the latest firmware upgrade, and started over from scratch...all is well now
It seems like my router firewall had built some rules for the incoming connections, and even with the ports opened, some things were not getting through.
I still see players not able to connect with the ICMP port unreachable error, but that seems normal since Epic introduced the network "fix" patch for UT.
-G