what am i missing?

[eluser]cityzen[/eluser]
THank you both Michael and Frenzal.

Frenzal, you're a life saver! With the amount of crap PHP just lets you get away with, I fell into using conventions that normally wouldn't squeeze through the strict error reporting, ie: isset vs. if($var). That's a big piece of the "what am I missing" so many, many thanks to you.

Michael, thanks for your reply (again) as well. I don't think I ended up punching my wife in the neck last night, but I sure did have CI dreams! Thanks a lot for the tip on rolling the upload error into the validation error handler, etc. I think these are some of the things I needed to get my past this frustration point. I *knew* there were things I could do but just didn't know exactly how or where to even start.

Have a great day!

Mike