move from dev server to live, can't log in

To start off, yes I have done this many many times. When it did not work I came to the WordPress site and re-read the instruction. I tried several of the tutorials that abound on the web and they all give the same results.

That said, here is the issue.

I have fully developed a site on a dev server under a tilde account. Once everything was go we changed the DNS and I did my backend stuff and we waited. Now I have an issue. Then I replaced all of the references in the Db the footers disappear and I can’t log in. When I restore the Db with all the old references every internal link is broken (of course) but I can log in.

When I change the ONLY siteUURL and Home in any of the ways under the sun (admin setting, phpmyadmin, sql commands,little code ya put in the wp-login.php file) the links are still broken but now I can’t log in.

If I do a blanket find and replace of the URL references (at this point I am desperate) the widgets and slideshow images go away and get default template info and I can’t log in.

Right now I have tinkered to get most of the links (excluding some widget links that are placeholders) to work. Menus and internal references are fine. I will be able to fix the hand coded widget links once I can get in. But I still can’t get in to the admin area.

here are server specs. I am running 3.3.1 which seems to have an update flaw. Three of four sites I have run it on went down. That’s what backups are for.

Apache version 2.2.19
PHP version 5.2.17
MySQL version 5.0.92-community
Architecture x86_64
Operating system linux
Shared IP Address ***********
Perl version 5.8.8
Kernel version 2.6.18-194.26.1.el5xen