finally found it

the problem was something missing - where it accepts events and puts them into a heap, it wasn't putting the event serial into the record with the event

no idea yet how this wasn't causing other errors but it seems to be fixed

the red flag was an error saying that it couldn't find an access timestamp record that should have been there

this never happens now with that change made

lots of mess to clean up but the bug is fixed, now i can at last move on!