My issue ended up being a version mismatch because of multiple installations.
I had a new pristine installation all patched up, and an older installation I'd intended to use as a mod test bed so I could really mess around and not have to worry about breaking the basic install. Long story short, the patches did not like having multiple installations and patch 1 would always patch the 1st installation, patch 2 would always patch the "latest" installation (aka the test bed) and never the two should meet.
So I hosed both, reinstalled, repatched, and just copied the freshly patched install over manually to a "backup" directory in case modding actually broke the install at some point. It's all good now.
Big thanks to Admin for noticing the version of the trace I sent in, I blew right past that looking for the error code at the bottom, because I "knew" I'd patched up.
