At my ropes end

I have been attempting to get a custom template page running custom php code natively fopr about a week now and am about ready to scrap WP from our project completely!!! I am so frustrated right now and have researched and tried every possible solution under the sun to get this to work, from plugins to page overrides. It should not be this difficult.

Here is the layout (concept wise)

Page 1 (for argument sake this will also be the slug name, which currently works fine) and builds two tables dynamically by making a call to an external database. Once the page is loaded, the user should be able to click on the links which bring up page two (again making calls to the external database again to get new table information) this time the table data is not populated and I am not sure why the code is not returned.

If I make my a href link on page 1 file to my page 2 file outside of the theme directory (i.e.my web root directory) the page and the data will load fine, yet any custom wp function calls are now lost.

Did I mention this is VERY frustrating!!!

If anyone can offer any help or beginning insight, I would be forever grateful before I have no hair left :o)

tia…

Shawn