It seems that if there is a problem with the install, the blog may work, but the admin section formatting gets funky.
so i’m back in business. as far as i can tell this was my problem… the installation widget (what ever it is) didn’t have a proper wp-config.php file at the beginning. Various things were done to correct this, however, there was never a clean install and start from the beginning. So to test, I backed up my entire domain, deleted everything, downloaded the beta 2.6.1 (to “upgrade”), replaced the wp-config.php file locally, added my theme locally, added the y_key_*.html locally, uploaded everything to the domain, confirmed that all of the files were in the appropriate folders, then from FireFox went directly from the update page (yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php) **NOT yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ **
The first thing that I noticed was that the formatting of the update was different (it had style instead of plain text). I updated the database and the site was live (and looks good). I then logged into /wp-admin/ and that looked the way I expected it.