Post Upgrade problem Suite 7.7.9 from Sugar 6.5

We upgraded a existing working installation of Sugar 6.5 to Suite 7.7.9. We tested on a test server and everything seemed to work. We then backed up and tested our live server and things seemed to initially work, but within the first two days we began having problems, as well as running across a couple things that may not have been tested thoroughly.

Problem #1 Users that are not admins can’t access opportunities and cases. Some dashboard items only say ‘no data’.

Problem #2 When trying to edit opportunities or cases, the data shows up in a window that says something like ‘error page’, is plain without CSS, and at the bottom says “If this error persists, please have your administrator disable Ajax for this module”. So we disabled ajax on most pages and they appear to work…

Problem #3 No longer able to edit records. When trying to edit records (cases, opps, users, etc) after clicking Save, goes to an all blank page, no errors. after re-entering the main page, the data was not saved.

At this point we are about to pull the plug on the whole thing and lose a couple days of data, and go back to SugarCRM. Not sure what else to do.

Ubuntu 12.04LTS if that matters.