NVM, I have resolved the issue! I think a corrupt save may have been giving me the headaches. Last night I was able to take the RC1 source, comment out the 2 lines in skills.cs (as they had done in SVN 73 to fix +gear) and compile a copy of server.exe that is able to run the shard without causing serilization issues! AND the + gear bug in RC1 is fixed with this! Wonderful!
Thanks
-GhostRiderGrey