Thank you @dspreadbury I was referring to the following:
and was attempting to follow your suggestion to create the playing techniques anew to change their position from above to below and have that stick as the default, since unstaring and starring wasn’t working consistently. But I recreated them by duplicating them, and deleted the originals which in some cases must have been parents of others and caused glyphs to go missing. Then I faced the great thorn in my side; the inability to know what fonts I had used originally and probably used Maestro instead of Finale Maestro or something like that which brought the glyphs in at the wrong size etc. etc.
None of this would have been necessary if I thought that I could actually get the change to stick by un-staring and re-staring. I will attempt to put things back as you suggested and then try the process again , perhaps with more success.