BTW, the home page preference was never officially changed from my original preference, but it was still going to linkeymac.com. However I did change it to something else, which made no difference. Still being hijacked by linkeymac.
UPDATE: Finally got it to update the Safari homepage preference to something other than linkeymac, but now it won't change to the page I actually want! Now I am wondering if this is actually an OS update issue with Safari. Was just initially worried it was a total hijack (and I suppose could still be). Any thoughts??