Boot process "creating corpses"

I have a fairly new iMac (bought last year) which was recently upgraded to 10.13.1. I shut it off last night with no problems.

This morning, the boot was slow and did not finish since the scroll bar under the Apple logo was all white and just sat there. I turned on the "verbose" mode and noticed that after a lot of information flashed by, it slowed down and then started with: "Process[198]crashed: opendirectoryd. Too many corpses being created". Then it started incrementing the process numbers and I aborted around 230.

Maybe Apple should revisit their messaging ( it is rather morbid) but that aside, I started Googling for a fix. I tried some suggestions which I found (not necessarily in that order) :

- Reset PRAM

- Checked the drive in Recovery Mode - Disk Utility and First Aid found nothing.

- Hardware diagnostics (passed)

- Running fsck -fy(passed) - no messages about system being modified.

- Safe mode boot (never kicks in)

- I reinstalled HighSierra and it did not take - same problem.

- Target mode launched but there is nothing on that box I want - it is primarily a test machine so I just want it to run.

- The last updates were installed few days ago and it was the new one for iMovie and to bring it up to 10.13.1which I installed separately.

I got the above diagnostic suggestions from other posts with previous versions of the OS and not High Sierra so I thought I would post in case there is something new.

Has anyone experienced it recently?

Thank you in advance,

Jack.

P.S. As I was typing this, the second attempt at a reinstall finished and still the same problem. I will see if it will roll back to a previous OS with Internet Recovery next.