So it turns out that somehow, installing SP7 MR3 corrupted the besadmin user profile on the bes server. Thought I should at least post my resolution for anyone that has a similar experience. Just another solution for them to try.
The way we figured this out, and by we, I mean me and my pay per incident support tech Ed from RIM, who after 4 hours on the phone was scratching our heads as to what was going on, was to create a new besadmin user, assign all the rights, change all the service logins to this new user and create a new mapi profile and then create a new user profile on the server. And it worked.
We then went back and deleted the original user profile that was stored on the server and re created it and then changed all the services and the mapi profile back to it and it worked.
Maybe there was a problem with the original profile and MR3 broke it or, maybe MR3 just broke it. There's really no way of knowing at this point. The tech did get a copy of all the logs from that day from the LOGS folder under the BES folder, plus all the application and system logs for the server. He didn't see anything in there to indicate an issue with the install or the original besadmin user.
So anyways, I was able to get my BES up and running again.
Stan.