An update:

I was able to manually rebuild both the config.inc.php and theme.inc.php files

It took lots of trial and error and I had to open some of the main PHP files in visual studio in order to identify some of the variables, but I was ultimately successful (took many hours).

needless to say, I have pulled backups of the *.inc.php files...
Thanks for all the help toward this painful task.

I discovered that any "update" click in the control panel wipes out the settings associated with that particular page (not all the settings in the entire file).

This is particularly problematic when the page happens to contain settings that live in both the inc.php files.

In a potentially related item, I noticed something else.

We have problems with spammers (not news)
I have been active in banning offending user IDs (as opposed to simply deleting them).
I don't delete them because the user ID records contain useful information when it comes to blocking IPs and IP ranges.

Typically, I will gather certain information about the user, place it in the notes field, uncheck the access radio button and clicj update.
What happens next is the page reloads with a SQL error.
And I have found that after I do this, I cannot access that user's record through the control panel.

While researching what the cause could be, I noticed the U_Groups, field was blank whereas the other users were assigned to "-3-".
So, I wrote a query to update that field and now, after I ban users, I run that query and I have managed to work around the problem.
Still though, I'm not sure if this problem is related to the problem with the *.inc.php files because the SQL error in this problem seems to indicate the query is expecting to find members of the "users" group and I am not certain if when I ban a member if that is supposed to blank that field (since there actually is a specific "U_Banned" field in the table).
If there is a connection, it would seem to be in if that U_Groups field is supposed to be updated or not and if not, why is it getting blanked.
I've not looked deeply a the "showuser.php" to see what is supposed to happen.

So, any different insights as to what might be causing the problem with the *.inc.php files?

If it is the "suhosin" problem, where does one look or what does one do in order to check and or repair this?