Finally, after lots of patience on the part the dev team (thanks a bunch) and some foolishness on my part, I found the solution. There had (unknown to me) been some contribs installed on the server in early version 6 and (also unknown to me) these were brought forward via the backup/restore tapes to land in the fresh install. There was a particular contrib that caused the problem. This was detailed and solved in bug #401 (from 2004).
Again, this was an odd problem that was particular to the set-up I am dealing with and I want to thank those that helped me solve the problem.
Henry