I deleted the Web Part from the WebParts table and still no luck. I looked at all related tables looking for oddities: Docs, Links, and NavNodes. I could not find anything that looked strange.

Every area except Home worked but nothing in the Home area worked. I kept getting the plain text out of range error with the '///_layouts/.......' As I posted previously when I deleted two of the three '/' from the error url I would get a formatted error page with the error graphic. this made me think something is messing up the URL. So I looked at the Webs table and found the entry for the portal and saw that the column 'FullUrl' contained a '/' so I deleted it and did a iisreset on the server.