I'm going to see if they will look at the pins and if they think they don't look right, have them send another motherboard.  I'm going to assume the one they sent me was a refurbished or something.
 
I'm assuming my CPU is probably okay.  I suppose I could do the test of plugging into the motherboard's monitor connection and test for that.
 
Yeah, the windows repair would not make me very happy if I lost some stuff or had to reinstall a bunch of apps.  And I still would think that if Windows was causing this type of error, it would know it was and throw some sort of blue screen or some kind of warning.  
 
Definitely not simple to diagnose.  

The tech said the following about HWiNFO64:  "Thank you for the images here, what does the bios say the temps are at? typically software's have had troubled history reading stuff like this properly"
I had attached images showing the section that showed the weird crazy temp fluctuations, as well as the Motherboard sensor readings that were not showing in that one section.  

Okay,....so this is weird.  And I hope I don't jinx myself for saying this.  On Friday morning, I powered down my system [turning off the power switch on the back of the PSU], took the GPU out of the vertical mount, and then inserting it directly into the motherboard, then [ofcourse] powered it all back up.  Since I've done that, I haven't had any freezing or rebooting issues.  
 
Again, I hope I don't jinx myself, but wanted to provide this report here.

RAVENEVGA
Okay,....so this is weird.  And I hope I don't jinx myself for saying this.  On Friday morning, I powered down my system [turning off the power switch on the back of the PSU], took the GPU out of the vertical mount, and then inserting it directly into the motherboard, then [ofcourse] powered it all back up.  Since I've done that, I haven't had any freezing or rebooting issues.  
 
Again, I hope I don't jinx myself, but wanted to provide this report here.

No you're not jinxing yourself. That is wonderful news.
Those riser cables have been known to cause a lot of problems when not pcie gen 4 rated or poor quality. I've never used one so the others can chime in.
I'm shocked that none of us thought to ask you if you were using a riser cable.
If nothing bad happens soon then you solved your problem.
I look for ward to your next report.

Thank you for the reply, frankd3.  I'm hoping it solved the issue.  It's been nearly a week.  I didn't want to say anything in just a couple days, but it's been smooth for long enough to report it here.
 
I liked the vertical mount, but am okay with the GPU mounted normally. 

Well...it certainly had us chasing our tails for a while. I hope this continues to be a fix. As Frank said, the vertical risers are known to cause a bunch of issues. Sometimes things just need to be re-seated, sometimes they just don't play nice with 3k series graphics cards. I have seen a lot of people in the forums with problems from their vertical riser, but none of them had your specific set of issues.

So whatever happened with the keyboard issue?
That wouldn't be related to the riser cable.

frankd3
So whatever happened with the keyboard issue?
That wouldn't be related to the riser cable.

No, definitely not. I suspect that is a faulty keyboard, but I'm not sure because I can't remember if the motherboard was having issues with other keyboards as well. The USB issues and the sensor issues seemed to point towards motherboard issue for me, which is why I had originally advised the RMA.

Thanks B0bananoosh.  It's why I still am going to consider this a "testing phase".   Not sure how long I will do this, but because my quirks were so odd, I didn't really think that just plugging the GPU straight into the motherboard would fix it all.  If the problem pops up again, then I'll figure out what to do then. 
 
I still wonder if I should just go ahead and flash the BIOS with the 1.15 version.  That might be a future step. 
 
Maybe unrelated....maybe related,....my Logitech headphones stopped being recognized when I plugged it in [before the GPU re-seating].  But plugged it in last night, and it was working.
 
As for the keyboard, I did replace it with the one currently installed right now, and I still got the freezing, but didn't have issues with it not connecting.  I went back to the EVGA keyboard for awhile, but because of all the issues, went back to the cheap keyboard [this was before I re-seated the GPU straight into the motherboard].  I want to give it another week, then try the EVGA keyboard again to see what happens.
 
And as for the sensors [with HWiNFO64], the tech said, "...what does the bios say the temps are at? typically software's have had troubled history reading stuff like this properly". 

So, it has been two weeks since I put my GPU straight into the motherboard, and haven't had any freezing/rebooting issues.  I still don't get how the vertical mount and riser cable could have been causing the issues, but not having problems since the switch around,........<shrug>
 
I'm still considering myself in a testing phase, though.