viHistory

I've been working for the better part of the last couple of days trying to figure out why the imap maps in ViHistory are not appearing.
Problem appears with the production front end and a test front end connected to either the old db server or the new db server.
Problem appears with a test front end which is the production front end minus the captcha code (which is the only code that has changed since Jamie left us a working site).
We weren't getting errors when we trolled the server logs on lettuce.
We did get the following errors from the sysadmin:
Apache error log:

[Tue Mar 06 09:16:21 2012] [error] [client 96.54.151.99] [Tue Mar 6
09:16:21 2012].616424 loadSymbolSet(): Unable to access file.
(/home1t/taprhist/www/content/maps/user/symbol/generic.sym), referer:
http://vihistory.ca/content/maps/htdocs/index.php?map=vicbird1889

AND syslog:

2012-03-06T09:16:21-08:00 local@mustard.hcmc.uvic.ca user.notice
php-cgi: PHP Warning: [MapServer Error]: loadSymbolSet(): (/home1t/taprhist/www/content/maps/user/symbol/generic.sym)
2012-03-06T09:16:21-08:00 local@mustard.hcmc.uvic.ca user.notice in: /home1t/taprhist/vihdev/www/content/maps/htdocs/init.php on line 125
2012-03-06T09:16:21-08:00 local@mustard.hcmc.uvic.ca user.notice
php-cgi: PHP Warning: Failed to open map file /home1t/taprhist/vihdev/www/content/maps/user/map/vi1798.map in /home1t/taprhist/vihdev/www/content/maps/htdocs/init.php on line 125
2012-03-06T09:16:21-08:00 local@mustard.hcmc.uvic.ca user.notice
php-cgi: PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function getMetaData() on a non-object in /home1t/taprhist/vihdev/www/content/maps/htdocs/init.php on line 131
2012-03-06T09:16:21-08:00 local@mustard.hcmc.uvic.ca local0.debug
suphp_wrapper: 0 PHP5
/home1t/taprhist/vihdev/www/content/maps/htdocs/init.php

That init file is as provided by the imap people, so I really, really doubt it is causing the problem, though it is the where a problem occurs. It looks like that file is trying to create objects based on what it reads from some kind of config file, and somehow that process is breaking down, so the object doesn't get created, so invoking a method on the (non-existant or empty) object throws the error. MOre precisely, it looks like the config.php file is supposed to create an array in the variable aszMapFiles and then those values are used in the init file, but for some reason something is failing with the way that array and associated variables are being populated.