I reset my activations and installed ecart on another mac (not maverick) we had here in the shop. it allowed me to create the pages, so that's done at least. it's not urgent now, so if you have something else you'd like me to try or some prefs to delete, i can just do that later, rather than take up your time with a phone call.
Crap! I forgot to install universal email on that machine too. I installed universal email and reran the checkout wizard. it gave me the same error