Hi Ken,
Thanks for your feedback.
The upgrade is being done on a dev site.
We do have about half a dozen customizations. The plan was to get the big upgrade done and then get the customizations put into module form so we won't have such a big problem in the future. We do have the code changes for all but one, the first customization we did. Since there have been so many upgrades and changes to moodle the customization codes have needed tweaking but that doesn't seem to be our main problem.
I'll check into the debugging and thanks for the link to the moodle freelancers.