OK, OK, I think I've figured it out. It was my mistake that the old OTRS system is running 1.2.3. Luckily we had not destroyed the box yet. I did a new dump of the database. Dropped the otrs database on the new box. Recreated the otrs database. Imported my dump from the old box. Now, here is the important part! Ran the DBUpdate-to-1.3.mysql.sql script on the database. Ran the DBUpdate-to-2.0.mysql.sql script on the database. No errors on either one, and now the whole system is behaving better. BTW, I printed the tickets that had arrived at the new system while trying to debug this mess. ARRRGGGHHH! the killing of more trees! --MPJ