ok.
took out the redhat apache instance, and rebooted. didn't get the same errors this time.
last problem was zmiptables, which i was manually calling in my firewall installation. obviously/apparently its not needed anymore
i think the upgrade should have overwritten the zmiptables script. shrug--not too big of a deal.
Anyway, all in all, it took about 30 minutes to do, with 15 minutes afterwords troubleshooting those two issues. "Pretty Damn Simple."
Thank you folks for all your hard work; we really appreciate it.