In the interest of solving the issue: With the same version of Resin/Drupal and MySQL, the installation on my laptop worked, but the one on the shared server did not. Actually, both installations worked initially .... it was the modules that screwed me up. On my laptop I untarred the files under the user name, so of course when you untar a module, it gets the same user id and group id as it was when it was tarred. On my laptop I moved the resulting directories to /sites/all/modules/module_name and as a result, they got the right name and username and group permissions.
On the shared server ... I took a slightly different tact. I moved the tarballs to /sites/all/modules and then untarred them there .... but then failed to change the username and group permissions to the same username and group that belong to all the other files.
Ultimately ... yeah, I did go off the "main path" ... but with the new Resin 3.1.4 and Drupal 5.5, and the modules set with the same username and group permissions ... everything is working 100% perfectly.
Thanks for all the help!