Hi Bill,
I've reading about your trails with Monticello/Metacello and been surprised about all the difficulties you are having. I frequently load fairly complex configurations on top of Pharo 1.3 without a problem.�
You can flush Monticello caches with:
MCMethodDefinition cachedDefinitions removeAll.
MCFileBasedRepository allSubInstancesDo: [:ea | ea flushCache].
and try removing the 'package-cache' folder from the folder containing your image.
other than that,�as others have said if you can isolate the problem we stand a chance of helping you
Nick