it definately was not the cable (tried different hdmi cables we had on hand, and the issue remained (even tried the other hdmi plugs on the video card-and other video cards)
got a new power supply- it arrived doa...wife pissed since i had to take APART everything to install the power supply,
so i plugged her keyboard into my computer, let her use mine while i stole my son's laptop gaming (which he never uses due to-shrug- college this upcoming fall(Umaine -Civil Eng or land survey major), got him a good high end gaming computer for taking to school) her keyboard- while not working with the game profile software(zengine) with her left gamepad, works close enough (oh and that work around listed above for her merc, didn't work, the driver installed, the software installs, but the second you switch from the zengine software to the game, the zengine deactivates the profile you loaded) that she was ok with it- ~4 buttons on the left side are not "right" now- using wow's interface setup, i could assign 1 of the 4 to what she wanted, the others, are set to shift alt and ctl buttons and cannot be reassigned via wow)
ultimately, i got her a midrange cyberpower computer from amazon( intel i5 8gig ram 120gig ssd 1tb hdd, nvidia 1060 video card), the mobo(b360 chipset) supports win7 but she was ok with using windows 10, so when it arrived i plugged in her ssd that has win7 and wow on it.
i did try to just boot to that drive- and it worked but no usb drivers for said mobo on ssd= no keyboard or mouse. so i booted to 10, installed her browser, discord, curse client(twitch app that boots directly to the addon section for wow) battle.net, pointed battle.net to where wow was, copied her profile from her win7 ssd for browser so that her bookmarks, settings, password stuff works in new installed browser) and she hasn't complained once. (ya i know workaround would be to boot the win7 ssd to win7's safemode with networking to load generic usb drivers and then install the mobo drivers for win7 that way, but i ran out of time due to me wanting to have it all set for her when she got home from work).
thanks for the suggestions you all had on the issue.
getting another power supply and using her 2tb hdd(that has windows 7 installed on it) from her old setup to get the "broken" computer running this weekend.