PROBLEM FIGURED OUT - What a pain....
After perusing the support forums for the last 8 hours I stumbled across one particular instance of Authorize.Net not supporting a ' apostrophe in the product name. I changed several product names to change this and lo and behold it worked..but also having to entirely rewrite the cart, short and long term descriptions. I have about 12-15 hours of programming now to do completely over because of the number of products and all the specific conditional changes for each..peachy...