Well, I think I finally figured this out (fingers crossed). Apparently the error was due to bad render files and I had to use render manager to eliminate the render files sequence by sequence.
What was interesting to note though, is that one of the sequence render files was not showing up in the render manager and so I had to manually track down the folder on the hdd and delete it.
After all that it looks like the project file is in good shape again and just in need of some rendering!