Ok, folks, I've marked this one as solved, thanks to some invaluable help from another member.
However, language issues ARE a problem, and that will need to be addressed at some point. While I don't know why the error was occurring, I do know there was a hiccup with the language, and it may be that those of us who use other languages are catching an unexpected bug here. I've manually uploaded the different language packs required by the membership, and the utf8 English so they have their choice again, but can't do much about the Norwegian characters in previous posts which are now replaced with gibberish. I can manually edit the important pages/posts to fix that, but I'm guessing this is an issue which won't be eliminated until the languages are incorporated into the install/upgrade . . .