In looking more closely it appears Filezilla was having trouble continuing transfers to backup before the cloning (timed out i suppose) so it only backed up partial uploads/avatars/ folders and hundreds were missing from my cloned site.
Uploaded the missing folders in chunks to be sure all crossed over… and ‘problem’ was solved.
Along the same lines – i just updated to 1.5 and now the friendship requests and accepting show the user an error with every action even though the friendship is accepted or sent successfully. : /
Says something like “There was an error processing your request please try again”
This is looking like it is an issue in conjunction with DRP WPUM – where you have settings to check if a banned user is still online. I suppose what i want is to disconnect how these two things affect each other.