well, it seems it was more PEBKAC than anything (as I'm sure you probably already guessed, lol).

The biggest problem I had was that on the original server, under Windows, table names were created all lowercase (not sure if that is a setting in MySQL somewhere or what, but it's how it behaves on my machine.... if I create `w3t_ThisTable`, it is created as `w3t_thistable`).
With the Threads scripts using the 'Hungarian formatting' of uppercasing the first letters of words.... that was fine under Windows which is case-insensitive, but it hosed me when moving to the new server which is Linux, and thus case-sensitive.

I did a clean install of Threads on the new server to get the correctly cased table names, then I had to edit all the export sql from the original server to correct the table names, but since doing that I was able to just tweak the Threads .includes paths and just upload the whole works as-is. A couple of small tweaks and everything is fine... Threads 6.5.5 with PHP 5.2.0 and MySQL 5.0.27 [Linked Image from dawgtalkers.com]

Jesus was an architect previous to his career as a prophet
All of a sudden, I found myself in love with the world
So there was only one thing that I could do
Was ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long