I have some very very old photons that I believe have never been setup/used in any way. Does "Photon with WiFi - Paired" in the setup.particle.io dialog window mean they are already claimed to an account? I see that as a possibility but pretty unlikely.
It been many years since working on anything like this so my apologies for what seems to be an incredibly basic question. Trying to knock out some cobwebs out of the brain.
I finally made some progress by bumbling around. I installed PuTTY with that running and the device in listening mode I touched numerous keys on the keyboard the device displayed the device id then prompted me for the local ssid and password. Once those were entered, it reported it was connected to the cloud. At that point i was able to claim the device with the particle cli using the command particle device add its_device_id. 
So to answer my own question "Paired" in this context does not signify if a device is already claimed or not. Cobwebs are already cleared a bit lol
In this context, paired means WebUSB in the browser has permission to connect to the Photon by USB and the connection has been made.
It's different than claiming.
thanks for adding the color
The reason I brought this question up in the first place was the setup.particle.io would not work for me to setup the device "seems like that would have been the easy way". I don't think its anything to do with my computer "windows computer running a chrome browser" as the same the machine was used with PuTTy and CLI to claim the device. Maybe there is something broken there or something that is blocked when using the chrome browser that the use of PuTTY and CLI does not encounter.