Ah, yes thanks for the info Tim...I had found Dave's posting farther down this page on Sunday and went through all of the steps. For whatever reason, it looked like it had worked fine but the error still persists. When I check the 'status', I still had that same error message and could only login as root.

I say "had" in the past, because all of my data is on this server I had to do something drastic (i.e. quick). In this case, I started up FileZilla on the PC and installed the FTP app through the marketplace. Then, I was able to sftp login as root and transfer all of my data off the server to various sources here for a future reimage.

It's one of those things where I would have liked to figure this one out, but didn't have a lot of time left to experiment.

If someone else reads this in the future and need to FTP off your data, just a tip that you have to secure FTP connect and (optionally) check the feature in FileZilla to preserve the file date/time in case that's valuable to you. You won't get the folder dates/times, but the file datestamps are carried over.