I went and moved the site to a new server and that seemed to allow stats to work again.. So something in the update did work well on that old server but is fine on this new one.
I noticed that the http connection test in the jetpack troubleshooter plugin thing didn't work for a SSL connection so perhaps that was/is what was causing the failure. If so jetpack needs to fallback to std http connection.
Thanks again for all the help on this.. I do appreciate it greatly.