I admit I made several big mistakes, here. The first was not having a backup of /boot as I thought I did. The next is thinking I could just copy the whole boot directory from a known working system and be able to get it to work by using sed to replace the UUID's of the system it was on with those of the system it will be on. Had I backed up the broken system instead the minute I knew there was a problem, it would have been fixable.
Trying to transplant the good boot system to a different machine really should work if one knows what all changed but if that was the case, I'd be crowing about how I got it working. I may try one last thing which is to decompress the initrd files and see if there is a way to make sure they work after transplantation. At this point, it's probably more important to know what is poisoning the well as a training exercise since having good backups of /boot would have turned a major halt in to a minor irritation. Trust me. The good system is going to get daily backups of boot and grub every 24 hours from this day on. I haven't actually done anything yet to clone the good system's boot drive because I want to do the clone in the middle of the night when things are quieter and I don't run fetchmail in the wee hours so the backup sees a more stable file system. If, by chance, I end up actually making the broken system work, I'll let you know what it was and the one drive can serve the whole system again. Martin