I have solved my issues with the upgrade.
I believe the problem is with Joomla's upgrading process, with respect to third party components. However, I also had to reinstall the yt_system plugin.
As for the third party components, I had to remove the tables from my databases for many components, and reinstall the components. Perhaps the issues were related to the components whose database tables were 'non repairable.' Needless to say, my sites are back up and running normally.
I would also like to suggest that once your SA based website is built, visit
gtmetrix.com and test your site. You can gain a lot of speed on your page loads by following some of the instructions there. It's my experience that SA templates run the fastest out of all others I have tested, including RocketTheme, Gavick and JoomlArt.
Walt.