We got this worked out in a ticket. There were a couple of problems occurring. The first problem was that the php error reporting code was returning an error itself. This was due to a white space character outside of the php block.
This exposed the next issue which was another white space character outside of the php block but it was in the globals file.
The final issue was getting the database loaded properly. This was resolved by using the included .sql file in the database folder with phpMyAdmin to import the file. The instructions for this are included in step 1 of the read me.