3DWidget - GameModeAndUI viewport focus

having a really weirrd issue with Widget Reflection - i have a point where i’m destroying a 3d widget in the world - and doing it in 2 different methods… 1 via UWidgetInteractionComponent and the other with the Escape Key pressed…

ESC key works fine… but when i use the UWComponent to simulate pressing an X button that in turn runs the exact same code as the Input::EscapeKey … i get a NULLPTR looking WidgetReflection output… anyone ever encountered this? both systems do EXACTLY the same thing and run the same functions to close out the widget…

The following attempts i’ve made after spawning this actor with the 3d widget - all of which dont make a difference.