Thanks jason for pointing me in the right direction. I have completed building a new set of checkout pages with the wizard that includes using paypal express alongside with authorize.net configs. I have not launched it yet live on my server because I still have a few questions.
1. On authentication for paypal express, it ask for a return url for confirmation. I have an SSL cert. Should I pass the information through my certificate?
2. on the confirm page I can see where the process transaction with paypal action does collect certain information and returns others but I can not see where it populates my session variables to be stored in my database. Am I missing something or is this done behind the scenes?
3. I have the pages set to use the sandbox as a testing server but I am sure about proceeding forward with the test and how I shoud go live once I am confident that all bugs have been rosolved.
Thanks Tony