The reason the Product Add feature would not work was due to my test environment although I do not know the specific cause.
Product update fails when I run it on a local test server from Expression Web 2 (this is the original problem Jason tried to resolve). However, when I moved the application to my test server root (C:\Program Files\Zend\Apache2\htdocs), open a browser and run it from there (index.php) the products update. I am satisfied that the original problem was related to my test environment and was not a PowerStore problem.