I'd say that everything is working and all of the errors I've encountered have been solved at this point. My machine is up to date, and the system and application portions of MMC aren't showing any unusual errors. I haven't yet tried to do anything that I had problems with before, such as fixing Windows Media player and HP's horrific printer software. I think I'll keep monitoring the system logs and do an occasional sfc for a couple of weeks before attempting anything more aggressive on the system.
I think the most important finding had to do with generating a cbs.log file in the recovery environment by setting the environment variable:
set WINDOWS_TRACING_LOGFILE={path}\CBS.log
That was a critical and great find on your part! I don't know why I hadn't found sites addressing that problem before, except that I probably hadn't worded my searches quite properly. After searching for WINDOWS_TRACING_LOGFILE several sites came up discussing it.
I think that this thread can be marked as [SOLVED]. Thanks to all of the Sysnative staff who helped in resolving my problems. Hopefully we've all learned something while working through this to a successful conclusion. Maybe many users won't be forced into doing a clean install (which was the only online suggestion I could find, but refused to do), because of what's been discovered and documented here.
