It’s working now. How I got it to work for me:
My hosting provider has an automatic wordpress install option. With everything mentioned above still in place I went through their wizard to set up a new wordpress blog. I chose the same path as the install that wasn’t working. I got all kinds of overwrite warnings, which I agree to. After the install completed I had a new sql database (automatically created by the install script). the default wp install was now working fine (Hello World!). I then went into phpadmin and imported the backup of my database from the old site. boom. everything was back and working great.
YABP, that is. I’m a nerd.
