ok so - all fixed, unfortunately without much helpful explanation of what happened. I ended up grabbing a backup of of the directory structure from last night at midnight, importing a mysql backup (created via the MODx manager

) and all was restored. We dealt with a handful of other wacky server issues today that had to do with some serverwide changes which randomly screwed up some permissions across the board.
I did however have to do abandon the Customize Manager Fields plugin. I can’t say for certain that it ’broke’ anything, but before I ran into my spew of errors the plugin seemed to be causing some slowdown as it was working. I think it also threw an error regarding the jquery.js inclusion. I broke the big fat rule - don’t dev on live site! I’ll take the thing back into the lab and see if I can get it tuned up then try to share any findings. Thanks for the reply. =]