Well,
the upgrade from 8.123 to 8.207 went without incident, but then the fun started.
Upgrading the database seemed to work OK, but the service wouldnt restat afterwards.
After a lengthy call with (a very helpful) service desk support agent, we finally got it to work.
The issue......
It would appear that if your MSSQL password is more than three characters (ours was 10 characters), then you will have a problem
I'm putting this here in case anyone has an issue down the road and does a search of the forums.
By changing the password we finally got it to work (after a lot of uninstalls, installs, and database restores).