openpublish database errors

Getting "files cannot be copied" error when hitting my site for the first time after totally fresh op installation.

I searched for that error and applied all the suggestions that people had, to no avail.

I'm a programmer so I went into file.inc which has the file_copy routine that was bombing. I found the error message and modified it to spit out the $dest field (where it's trying to copy TO) (duh, right?) And it was trying to copy to the sites/default/files/css directory, so I changed the permissions on that as I had already done with the /tmp directory.