Hey Chris,
The site is a single portal site, meaning it is the site that is portal 0... the one created during installation. That is why it was great to be able to edit the file mentioned above and allow that template to be used instead of blank or aphelia templates as are the standard options when installing DNN 7 CE.
The option of using a version 7 resource file as a install template in 6.2 would be great if there where not braking changes in the 6.x to 7.x builds. So that isnt going to help me here. I did see a video that you made showing how, using the administrator Site Wizard, to setup the site and that is the only option that gets me 90% of the way back to recover.
It was a fantastic tip about the resource file being a zip format, because I then renamed the file to end in the .zip extension and could see all of the physical files that were packed... though it wasnt a complete copy of the portal... but a partial. Still required a manual copy of the portal to overwrite the Site wizard modifications though.
It would be a fanstatic thing if you could make a video / training about using the Site export feature with optionaly included Site export templates for recovering from exactly this kind of issue (like we could in DNN 6.x) as well as offering a viable means of porting a site from a development environment to a live site in a quick and clean and troublefree manner. There are so few resources out there that describe this technique, I am sure many would subscribe to the training session.
I appreciate your time and effort and value your input more than i can decribe... thanks a million.
Bill