@EA_Kipling no need, my issue is now fixed, have accepted this as solved and edited my initial post to reflect this was just responding to the guy mentioning his trouble as well in case what I found out could be useful.
to be clear, it turned out that there was 1 member (who was nowhere near the 2 top ranks in guild, would have been a member) logged on.. on patch day and found all our characters gone and in lead of guild.. they changed the guild name thinking we had left and had no way to contact us, How this happened is beyond me why it would kick and not reinvite but I assume there was some sort of inactivity limit for reinviting any characters when reforming guild. Also, really could use an email sent to the guild leader if the guild leadership is about to go inactive, this seems like a basic feature that I could have used to make sure i did not go inactive. Thank you for all of your help and I appreciate all you have done.
