I found a solution. I did some more searching and found another article here in the community. This guy had the exact same issue I did. How he solved it was to pull a regular switch from elsewhere in his home, because they are the same switch the 3-way and the regular on/off, and replace the 3-way. I did this and it works fine.
I put the 3-way on/off back in place of the old on/off i have had for a year and it works… if I wanted the light to always be on. So the switch that came from the 3-way package seems to be the problem.