Thank you both for your help. As stated above I put a small brush down the needle channel and was able to remove a very small amount of dust. I sewed several more lines of stitching without looping on the bottom. Let the machine sit overnight and tried it again without changing any settings and it sewed a beautiful stitch. Rethreaded the machine, removed the shuttle and replaced it in the normal fashion, brought up the bobbin thread as per the proper way and it never skipped a stitch. I will wait for several more test runs before I will believe that just that small amount of "fly thru the air" lint in the channel was causing such bad stitching. Again thank you - I love this board!