Just wanted to share a tip.. If you are going to work directly on the client's hosting account, next time you should setup a sub-domain for your staging environment.. this way you can configure the site to your hearts content while the landing page is unaffected.. Using a sub-domain will make transferring the site easier as the only change you need to make is the paths in the configure.php files..
Totally kicking myself for not doing that right from the beginning! Believe me, I will from now on! Think the reason I didn't was that I wanted to use the SSL cert I installed, which doesn't cover subdomains. Still, I should have just disabled ssl during staging. Grrr!

Thanks, Diva.