After a good hour and a half of google searches, and checking several times to ensure my prefs.ini file (in all the various locations) was not set to read only, and that all the users listed on the PC had full controll; nothing changed, so I'm posting here.
BTW I just upgraded to an SSD, and have my old HDD as a data & steam drive, but I formatted it and did a clean install on both drives. I did however use the drag and drop method from my external hdd backup to transfer my steam stuff, but I validated the integrity of the game cache. Also I just downloaded the official high res pack thismorning.
specs:
i5 2500k
8g 1600 mhz ram
xfx radeon hd 6950 2g 256 bit gddr5
corsair force 3 120 g sata3 ssd
western digital re4 7200 rpm hdd