The MFT is GoAnywhere from HelpSystems (formerly Linoma Software)
What I found was that Kleopatra put itself as the associated application for .asc files. Once I changed that, I was back in business. Interestingly, it left Adobe for the .pgp extension.
I should have thought at file associations but it didn’t click that a simple download via the browser (Chrome) would launch an app to handle the file.
Thanks for the nudge.