All - for the sake of the project I'm working on I figured it out.
I rewrote some of the queries and changed a bit of clunky logic and it works now.
I still have the same basic question that I cant get past. How can a query produce a value but when Totals/Sum does the aggregation the values are zeroed? Even with my underlying clunky logic once the un-totaled query is created the Totaled query should give the same result and not zero values out.
Thanks all for the input. I'm always amazed how helpful everyone is with other peoples projects.