First of all THANKS to everyone for your thoughts, ideas and work on this issue. I think Torvista and mc12345678 may be right and that it has to do with the fact that the name of the directory where the site is sitting on the web server is different. I'm going to do a test to check if creating the site in a directory of the same name will make a difference. Honestly the problems (mostly due to my own lack of knowledge) have made me nervous about the process of moving the site and we're going to avoid the possible pain and do an end around.
Fortunately, we haven't started inputting products so all the discussion has made me reconsider finishing the site locally (AMPPS)...and have decided to go ahead and take the designed site...upload it to the web server and do the product input online. Part of the decision was based on the fact that we don't want to take the chance with complex solutions (ie Db changes, etc.) the other is that in the Ceon URI documentation they have the following:
HTML Code:
If the site has existing Categories/Products/Manufacturers/EZ-Pages, they'll continue to use the standard Zen Cart dynamic URIs, until a URI has been entered or auto-generated for them, by editing the respective Category/Product/Manufacturer/EZ-Page in the admin.
This means going in and editing every Category/Product/Manufacturer/EZ-Page for which a static URI mapping is desired.
This gives you full control over all of the site's URIs, one of the main points of this module.
Since it sounds like the module is made to keep the old page address we just don't want to mess with it at the point because we want to have the site up and running soon. On the other hand I'm definitely interested in exploring this issue because I want to continue developing Zen Cart sites locally and if there is a easily replicable way of solving this problem I would like to do it.
I'll do some experimentation with creating the site in a directory with the same name as the local version...and with playing with the .htaccess file. I'll update the thread with my progress.
Thanks!