The "off by $0.01" issue was taken care of by the module. So that's not related.

Sorting out the shipping config for that product is probably a useful consequence of investigating the issue.


For "On the Final Step, I hit 'confirm the order'", what's supposed to happen is your store talks to PayPal in the background and once the valid payment is completed, takes the customer to checkout_success.
If your PayPal module's Logging setting is set to "Log To File", then in your /logs/ folder will be a PayPal_CURL_xxxxxxx.log file, which shows all the parameters sent to PayPal, and the response. You didn't quote that one. Need to understand what's going on there.
(In fact, for Express Checkout there are 3 CURL files per transaction. For Payments Pro there is 1)

You quoted another diagnostic file which merely shows how PayPal calculated the transmission details while attempting to determine line-item display etc. While that's helpful for "some" aspects, only the data in the PayPal_CURL_xxxxxxx.log files actually captures what happened while sending the transaction to PayPal and the response received.


Or maybe the whole thing really comes down to this? (grin)
[comments] => Stand on one leg while packaging shipment.