2.5 Admin Ajax Javascript Broken

This one has me completely stumped. We (three different authors) have lost all functionality in the wp-admin areas. The installation / upgrade from 2.3.3 was a complete re-install and literally everything worked just fine for a eight days, then boom, gone. The odd thing, to me, is that I have a testing blog set up on the same host (VPS, running Red Hat Enterprise Linx) that is NOT experiencing these Admin problems, and is running all the same plugins.

It appears to me that there is some kind of error in jquery.js that I cannot seem to fix. Here is the output from Firebug when I try to Write a New Post:

missing ) after argument list
[Break on this error] [c])p=p.replace(new RegExp('\\b'(c)'\\b','g'),k[c]);return p}('(J(){7(1e.3N)L w=...
jquery.js (line 11)
jQuery is not defined
[Break on this error] jQuery(document).ready( function() {
common.js (line 1)
missing ) after argument list
[Break on this error] Math.max(Math.min( parseInt((fx.pos * (fx.end[0] - fx.start[0]))...
jquery.color.js (line 18)
missing ) after argument list
[Break on this error] ng"&&typeof fn[0]=="undefined"&&RegExp("function","i").test(fn""));};var i=0;var...
jquery.schedule.j... (line 2)
missing ) after argument list
[Break on this error] var re = jQuery('#' r).html('');\n
wp-ajax-response.... (line 15)
missing ; before statement
[Break on this error] autosaveLast = $('#post #title').val()$('#post #content').val();\n
autosave.js (line 6)
missing ] in index expression
[Break on this error] (function($){$.dimensions={version:'1.2'};$.each(['Height','Width'],function(i,n...
jquery.dimensions... (line 12)
missing ) in parenthetical
[Break on this error] top: (offset.top input.offsetHeight) 'px',\n
suggest.js (line 57)
missing ] in index expression
[Break on this error] $.fn['tabs' method] = function() {\n
ui.tabs.js (line 31)
missing ) after argument list
[Break on this error] return s.nonce || url._ajax_nonce || $('#' s.element ' input[name=_ajax_nonc...
wp-lists.js (line 22)
missing ) after argument list
[Break on this error] b.html('<a href="" class="save">'??崧.save'</a> <a class="cancel" href="">'??崧.c...
slug.js (line 11)
unmatched ) in regular expression
[Break on this error] jQuery( '#tags-input' ).val( new_tags.join( ',' ).replace( /\s*,\s*/, ',' ).rep...
post.js (line 14)
missing ; before statement
[Break on this error] document.getElementById('content').style.height = H.ch - 30 'px';\n
editor.js (line 9)
missing ) after argument list
[Break on this error] jQuery("body").append("<div id='TB_load'><img src='"詨??.src"' /></div>");//add...
thickbox.js (line 56)
missing ; before statement
[Break on this error] while (str.length < threshold) { str = "0" str }\n
quicktags.js (line 22)
f has no properties
[Break on this error] var tinymce={majorVersion:'3',minorVersion:'0.6',releaseDate:'2008-03-xx',_init:...
tiny_mce_config.p... (line 37)
edToolbar is not defined
[Break on this error] <script type="text/javascript">edToolbar()</script>

(I hope that code markup worked)

Here’s what I’ve done to try to resolve it, and none of it has helped, even briefly.

1) Deactivated all plugins.
2) Deleted all plugins.
3) Re-load wp-admin and wp-includes from a fresh download of WordPress (deleted the wp-admin and wp-include directories, did not overwrite)
4) Cleared cache on Firefox, repeatedly.
5) Cleared private data on Firefox, repeatedly.
6) Forced re-load on Firefox, repeatedly.

Other indicators of problems:

• I (a logged-in admin) cannot post a comment – it returns a blank page, with no error messages.
• However, the scriptkiddie spammers can post comments (so my spam queue is filling up rapidly.
• Ajax/javascript functionality is lost across all Admin pages – widgets, comments, theme management.
• Write Post (or Page) gets me this message: Your attempt to add this post has failed. Please try again. Trying again does nothing. No errors reported by Firebug, either.
• Cannot login with IE7.
• Cannot recover password with IE7.
• The problem is occurring with three different users in three different parts of the country. Meaning, I don’t think it’s a network cache issue.
• Two different OSes in use – Windows XP, and MacOS

So, the common failure across this entire mess is a Firebug error message for jquery.js:

missing ) after argument list
[c])p=p.replace(new RegExp('\\b'(c)'\\b','g'),k[c]);return p}('(J(){7(1e.3N)L w=...

I’m kinda out of options here, short of nuking the database and starting from scratch. It’s the only difference between my production install and my test install, so I’m suspecting some wacky widget code is stuck in there and blowing something up. I’m really reluctant to do that as there are 1500+ posts, and the SQL file is over 13MB in size (which bugs me, as that seems excessively large, but I haven’t gotten into the database debug mode yet, as I’m a database moron.)

Any ideas whatsoever? I’m happy to post any more information that might be helpful, including database info.