Toufiq,
Thank you for the fast response. I am familar with Akeeba backup and transferring sites to different servers. In fact this is how we created our development instance.
What is important to understand that our production site has information that is confidential and private. Due to privacy and security policies, I cannot give a third party unrestricted and unmonitored Super User access.
I am not asking you fix the issue, I am asking for guidance and pointers so that I can apply the fix myself.
Thanks for your understanding and assistance so far.
Eric