ahaaaaa! i have found resolution.. lol.. months later.
i decided to take a stab at fixing this and set it up from scratch again. i encountered the same problems as before.
i decided to go looking for new titanium ISOs and found them easy enough. i mounted and installed these, patched and bam! works fine!
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
so what was actually going on is there was some issue with the files i had before. curiously, my buddy uses the same ones without issue *shrug*
specifically they were from caseyEQ on some forum or another. the convenience of these files was that there was no need to install as it was a complete directory.. you just had to add the patch. however, this stopped working at v33.
anyways, if anyone runs across this sort of spell file shenanigans and nothing else will fix it... it might be worth finding out if you used an already complete titanium directory or actually installed from mounted ISOs (or physical cds if you have that sort of thing.)
cheers! thx for all the help to those who tried.