/sigh really frustrated / annoyed. moving from 4.7.6 to 4.9.0 killed my project

Ahh glad it worked! Occasionally it does just help to clean up the folders, some of the config files / temporary files don’t transfer well between engine versions.

Those yellow errors indicate that you have a static mesh actor in the world but without any actual mesh assigned I believe, you’d have to go through the scene using the Scene Outliner and delete the ones you find. However if you click on the text, it should take you directly to them and you can hit the delete key or fix the issue.

That might in turn fix the red warning as well.