ATIH2011 "Backup Now" produces bizarre errors and quirky UI behavior

 I am trying to submit a support ticket on this, but the Acronis website won't let me. It keeps saying "error, try again later." I have only a few days left on the 30-day support, so I'm putting it on the forum for now...

I have a scheduled backup that runs every 2 weeks. I had just installed some programs, so I wanted to do a quick update of the backup. When I click "Backup Now" from the main screen nothing happens. Rebooted the machine and it says in red "the backup is corrupted." Checked the log and it said it couldn't run the service with these credentials.

• How can credentials be invalid? The Acronis service uses the system account. My current user login has full admin rights.
• After reboot, I ran backup validation and it said "operation completed successfully". Didn't report any errors found during validation.
• UI on main screen continued to show in red "backup corrupted" despite the validation having just run and not reporting any issues. Log for the validation action didn't report any issues found either.
• Deleted the "backup corrupted" message by clicking the 'x' and reran the backup validation.
• Now the main screen shows the green bar that says "The backup is valid". Clicked "Backup Now" to update it, and nothing happens.
• Rebooted again. Main screen no longer shows any statuses at all in the backup list (i.e. the green "backup is valid" box is gone for all of them). Closed and restarted the program, and now it says "Backup is corrupted" for the backup I was attempting to work with. So I'm back where I started.
• Since the backup is suspect, I am starting from scratch. The UI won't let you delete a backup without wiping out all its settings along with it (i.e. throw out the bathwater and the baby...), so I backed up the scheduler settings first, then deleted the backup. Not wanting to lose the settings, I then imported the settings that I had just exported. The task won't run, but at least the settings are intact. (Note, backup settings file is attached in this posting).
• Since I've deleted by backup and the task refuses to run, I am going to try doing a backup with a boot disc. Hopefully it'll work.

I thought about just completely removing this backup task's settings and rebuilding from scratch, but I doubt that will help. I just built it last week (i.e. not leftover from upgrading previous ATIH). At this point I don't know what to do. Keep using the boot disc to make backups? Yikes!!!