screw it.. I used Motorooter 1.4 to restore a old image, upgraded thru Verizon to 5.5.893, re-rooted and all is well.
Not too happy with Titanium Backup Pro... I thought it would gzip the entire root "partition" and it would let me extract certain files..but I dont think it works that way.
At any rate..problem solved. Thanks to all who replied. lmao.