CodeIgniter Rocks. I have several sites built on CI2 and love it. Other than this issue migrating to CI3 was fairly straight forward. I would like to thank the community that answers questions for folks like me and the folks at the British Columbia Institute of Technology for picking it back up.
I have chased this in a circle and still do not understand the why but I think I understand the what.
I have always stored the session data in a table in my MySQL DB, not for speed as much as security (right or wrong). With CI2 this was never a problem. Commands like db->start_cache, db->stop_cache, db->flush_cache all worked as expected. With CI3 and a sessions table they do not when a WHERE or ORDER_BY is present. I guess CI2 was caching the query in a cookie?? Long story short, I gave up trying to get it to work with a sessions table and configured the sessions for file storage. Works like a charm. I have one question if someone happens to read this. the session data is destroyed upon logging out and closing the browser window but the file remains. I could do a CRON job one per day to clean any that are more than 24 hours old but would rather have CI delete this as it exits.