I'm only posting the following so that everyone can see that I own up to my mistakes!
I stand by my original assessments though:
1- Wife hit one side of 3 way switch and the fan/light went off and switches wouldn't turn them back on again.
2- The switches worked for 15 years, those weren't my installs
3- As I pulled down the motor housing on the old one, the light came back on (lead me to believe a short)
4- Disconnected rest of fan/light
5- Bought 2 new switches
6- Bought new fan/light
This is where I screwed up somewhere.
1- I replaced switch at bottom of stairwell
2- I replaced switch at top, where the fan/light was
3- Installed new fan/light and left hanging from bracket, can't get either to power on. Give up and wait for electrician
4- Dwell on it at night
5- Dwell on it in morning
6- Got to Home Depot again and get some wire & a new meter
7- Still nothing
8- I notice the one switch has RED wire on top right of switch. RED wire was on bottom of other switch. WTF?
9- I put the RED the same on both switches, and move the other to the red position
10- Yay! Now I have light!!!
11- Waste my time putting everything back together. Light goes and no fan!! WTF??
12- Spend hours troubleshooting
13- After checking with meters 1000x to make sure I'm right, I swap the 2 blacks - one is in upper left, other on lower right.
Voila! Fan and light work. Put everything back together, put switch plates on and put all tools away.
14- Play with both switches 80x to make sure it stays working. And it does.
Ya know, I don't even know if that's the damn order. All I know is that even when I "thought" it was all working another time, both fan and light working, it wasn't. That's when wife went to bottom switch and turned off. When that one was off, the upper wouldn't do anything no matter if the switch was up or down. When the bottom was in UP position, the upper worked fine. Cables were backwards.
I fucked up with the damn wires 6 inches from my face. Thank God I didn't blow out a socket/switch or start a fire. I should have used tape on every single wire, marked them, took a picture - so that it was impossible to get it wrong.
I still have no idea what started the whole issue, that she turned the unit off at the switch and it never came back on again. And of course I compounded the issue by getting the wires on the switch wrong. Basically, picture the 3 wires (upper left, upper right, bottom right) they all went in clockwise position to the next lead. To fix it, they needed to go back counter clockwise to their original positions.
AT and Gunny were right, should have waited and got an electrician. And I highly recommend that to anyone else that isn't 1000000% sure of what they are doing. I was 99% sure and the 1% got me! I figured it out because I couldn't seem to let it go - but I was only lucky I suppose that I didn't harm anything.
Those in the know - could having these wires wrong like that between the 3 way switches cause anything more than a blown switch, or killed fan?