TL;DR
after updating steam version to 1.0 two different instances of my alpha 21 game got corrupt.
solution:wipe out the registry entry.
I have 2 games going simultaneously, for the last several months I have had a Ravenhearst game going on the old pre-release version. On 6/25 I started a new version 1.0 game. I know how to keep the 2 games completely separate. Ravenhearst lives on my E:\ drive and steam knows nothing about it. vanilla lives on my D:\ drive in all the standard normal default steam stuff (%steam%\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die).
My issue is that all my old saves had their region files reset as soon as I started a new version 1.0 game. my version 1.0 game is set to identical "Disabled" on chunk reset. Worse than that it seems that with version 1.0 it is ignoring chunk reset setting and resetting them anyhow. I can restore an old save (I zip the whole save folder up once in a while due to the last 9 years of issues) and provide logs.
Note the logs seem to hamburger between each other cause you don't write logs to the game directory, but you mush both instances into one common place - the %appdata% folder.
6/25 log (the first instance of version 1.0):
Mono path[0] = 'D:/Steam/steamapps/common/7 Days To Die/7DaysToDie_Data/Manag - Pastebin.com
6/09 log, a typical ravenhearst night:
Mono path[0] = 'D:/Steam/steamapps/common/7 Days To Die/7DaysToDie_Data/Manag - Pastebin.com