Ned,
   Thanks for such a thorough comment this saved me lots of time now I don't have to dig so deeply into the problem.


"After spending some time trying to understand how this all works or doesn't across the various Tk's, I am coming to the conclusion that we need to define a new set of default key bindings for OS X, one that generally avoids as much as possible the use of Command key and Option key accelerators, as these tend to be especially problematic either in Tk or with system conflicts, and, instead, use Fn keys for non-trivial accelerators."

I like your purposed solution so I will look into trying to creat a new key binding for OS X.