Acer BIOS locking "bug"

[humon]

I have an old Acer laptop (E5-523G type).  Recently it failed to boot to my grub menu and instead went straight to the Windows 11 side of the dual boot.  When I tried to invoke BIOS (F2) on boot I was prompted to put in the password.  As far as I knew there never was a password!
I tried entering some possible passwords to no avail, but after the third try there appeared on the screen a key code number.
After a lot of looking through my old notes and searching the interweb I discovered some GitHub stuff that provided a java app that allowed me to put the key code in.  The app then spat out some possible pass codes.
I F2 booted to the BIOS prompt, tried three times and on the fourth was prompted with the key code.  I put one of the pass codes in and it worked!
Once in BIOS I was able to reset the boot order and rebooted, only to find I was locked out again.  The laptop wouldn't run grub so it booted to the grub rescue prompt instead.  I used ctrl-alt-del to reboot then F2 to invoke BIOS entry again.
Repeating the earlier procedure, this time on the first password prompt, I got back into BIOS and shut off Secure Boot.  This time the machine booted to the grub menu and now works fine.
It turns out UEFI has several layers of phasing-in implementation done over the years and these various "flavours" can leave the BIOS open to unexpected change leading to lock-out.  Various manufacturer firmware can lock-out and folks have figured out how to find interim unlock methods.  I found the following: https://dogber1.blogspot.com/2009/05/table-of-reverse-engineered-bios.html which lead me to https://github.com/let-def/insydious where I found the java code.
I hope this post will save time for folks who experience the BIOS lock-out.  It's not THE answer, just an answer that worked for me.  I offer it on this forum because I have some problems with my Siduction machine that I will now try to solve using the same methods.

[hendrikL]

I moved that to a more useful place.

[devil]

Did you by any chance update your BIOS lately? Secure Boot gets enabled with some devices after that.

[humon]

Thanks for moving this post to a better place.
I am quite sure there hasn't been a recent firmware update because it's an older Acer laptop type Aspire-E15 model E5-523Q.
The Laptop System: Acer product: Aspire E5-523G v: V1.18
mobo is Acer model: Wasp_SR v: V1.18
and UEFI: Insyde v: 1.18 date: 06/28/2017.
The machine was used to watch a streaming service via the Windows side of the dual boot.  As I understand it Win 10 or 11 may somehow reset some of the BIOS settings as it runs updates.