All I did was put an identical version of the site including ZP in a different dir as root and now ZP doesn't work with my theme. It works fine with the standard themes but with mine it does find an include file that is definitely there. this is really making my head spin.

works in http://sonicparke.com/skydev/gallery

Doesn't work in works in http://sonicparke.com/skyway/gallery

Has anybody experienced this kinda thing?

I got it working. It was a latteral move of the entire site from dir "A" to dir "B" and for some reason in doing that the path depths chagned. So once I got rid of ../../../filehane and made it ../filename it worked. Even though that shouldn't have changed. weird. Also I had to change one include from ./filename to just filename. really wierd.