Thanks for the input, I understood what you were saying and not questioning more than just relying on 'Murphy's Law' and I know one small mod 'here' can effect things 'there', but also like to review what seems to be the obvious problem before attacking others.
What it turned out to be is the diagnostic portion of a script from a custom Joomla module for pulling in content and didn't have anything to do with vBulletin, it is fixed now and you were right it wasn't vBulletin 3.7.3 PL1 and vBgallery 2.4.3, it just wasn't the plugins which I had already disabled in my trouble shooting process, but didn't want to seem argumentative with someone trying to help me.
The messing up of my templates is when the process goes to find images, or verify paths I should say, it goes and inserts gradients and colors from the defualt template into my custom one, and if I forget about it, it gets me when I just hit 'Save' in the vBgallery update script. Just an aggravating annoyance when you are already a bit testy.
Thank you for your time, advice and efforts, much appreciated.