Ok I got a fresh bandage on the old forehead from my dearly beloved wall with the sign on it that says "beat head here". So I thought I would share this...

When creating a new bizobj, and new data environment to boot, and you check your stuff in and out of VSS on a daily basis... BeWare the Read Only attribute on the mmdataenv.dbf/cdx/fpt files. Even if you tell VSS to make the project writeable, it seems to set that darn mmdataenv table to read only no matter what. So of course on your way out of the dataenvironment dialog you get an error message saying "cannot update cursor" and tracing thru the debugger doesn't help identify this one easily. Check explorer - sure enough the darn lookup table got set back to read only.