nearly - the only time it worked was when i had a package in the local file system and used the old installer (/acs-admin/apm/packages-install). Using the new installer, the packages get downloaded correctly, but the DB files are not sourced whether the package is already in the file system or not.
Running QDDebug and postgresql in full debug has yielded no info, so nothing seems to be hitting (or attempting to hit) the db connection pools.
It could be a filesystem location since I am not following the standard /web convention on that server, and the server that works is.
I was 100% up to date on both servers when I ran the tests yesterday (I double checked) and a quick check of the core packages shows no cvs diffs since then.