Ok, I did find a solution, so I hope this info will help someone.
As I stated above, I had checked and triple checked the permissions on all applicable folders. Here was the issue, I happened to have also had Front Page Extensions enabled for the site. even when I removed them, the web hosting
tech had to manually change ownership issues to recover ownership back to “normal”. That did the trick.
https://www.zeroexp.com/zeroexpwp