Hi and thanks for all the help! I finally figured this out (at least what was happening), but not really why and I cannot reproduce now. Something was garbling the main site template (protostar) index.php. That was causing the "$task" in calls to echo (good guess Randy!). For some reason it happened on 2 clean installs of Joomla followed by Seblod, but not on 6 clean installs of both after that. All I can guess at this point is maybe bad hard drive sectors or something.
In any event, it remains a mystery and no longer seems to occur so onward.
I like the power, flexibility and interfaces of Seblod, but it does seem to add a lot of bloat with the templates and such in all the core Joomla screens in the admin areas.I do realize that integration with the core is by design, but things seem to be getting pretty cluttered and I haven't even done much yet. We'll see how things go for the next few days. Right now I am just trying to make a base CKK (or derivative thereof) decision.
My clients site is a conference management system with a huge requirement list that will require lots of "table" joins so that will weigh high in my decision..