I followed your directions @dspreadbury and thankfully was able to restore the Playing Techniques to original condition.
Then I tried again to change a Playing Technique from "above’ to “below” in the way one would expect.
However, no matter in what order I:
a. un-starred,
b. changed from “above” to “below”
c. re-starred,
the change was never accepted as part of my user library and did not appear in a new file opened after the change was made. (Yet last year I was able to change a couple of them in this way.)
At one point I un-starred the Playing Technique, hit OK and to my surprise discovered on reopening the edit playing techniques window that that Playing Technique had disappeared from the list; I had to restore it as you suggested above.
Since I can’t seem to edit existing Playing Techniques in the normal way, I will use your original suggestion and duplicate them and change the duplicate. However, this leaves my panel littered with undesired items. If instead of deleting the undesired items., I un-star them, will this accomplish the same thing without creating the havoc I encountered when I started this thread?