I found I could fat finger the information I needed to update into the "tabs" table, I was surprised to find all the information in one table. I'd still like a more graceful way to perform these actions, but its nice to have solved the problem. In a perfect world I would check if the "tabpath" was going to be updated with the page edit and offer the option to leave the "tabpath" alone so that links dont break, or at the very least provide the user this information (Warning: If you hit update the url will be changed and bookmarks, search engine indexes will be affected.) Then again I do not live in a perfect world.... Maybe this information will help someone else

Matt

You can change the tabPath in the table, and as you have found, it will work OK.  However, you can't make any changes to that page without the value getting overwritten again.

The reasons for this are historic - the tabId used to form the main part of the Url, and the TabId never changed, so it didn't matter what you did with the pagename.  Now, with humanFriendly Urls, the tabid is removed from the Url, and the path can change.  I expect the main reason the TabPath field is not editable is because many people would break their site without fully understanding what they are doing.

As a self-plug, my Url Master module (see link in signature) allows you to create your own Urls and redirects for pages.  This means you can de-couple the page name and Url for the page.  You can also setup redirects so that if you change the page name, you can have the old Urls forwarded to the new Url, or you can just redefine the Url to match the old (as you have done with the tabpath field).  It does this and a lot of other things as well, all in the field of managing the Urls on your site.

You may want to look at a more permanent and powerful solution like this, so that you don't inadvertently overwrite your changes again when changing page settings.