BillGL

After lots of convoluted troubleshooting this ended up being much easier than expected. I had to move to php 5.4 and everything started working.

Thats part of whats frustrating me, I did this. So far I have:

Disabled all plugins via phpmysqladmin
Reenabled all plugins then disabled all plugins by renaming the plugin folder
Reenabled all plugins and restored from my backup folder
Installed a fresh 3.8 installation in another folder and moved that folder over to the primary blog location
Restored from my backup folder and manually installed RC2 to update

I still run into the same issues.