openpublish bad install

I know I've done the "wrong" thing here but desperate times call for, well you know. I'm more or less a Drupal newbie, but I've been tossed into trying to get OP up and running for a small local paper. I could get other solutions running, but I really like OP and I know the client would as well so I want to exhaust my options before I throw in the towel on it. After getting it installed and getting all the API keys and that goodness set up I realized that with my vanilla install there were a lot of things broken. This was obviously pretty disheartening.

OpenPublish is a complex, large Drupal distribution that (due to its large code-base) has higher minimal hardware requirements than bare-bones Drupal. Because of this OpenPublish is not officially supported on the shared hosting environments (even though some of our crafty users, have still managed to run it on some shared hosts :)).