I decided to take a backup of the production courseI had made before altering the SQL tables and see if it would restore to my local machine that I switched to last weeks's 1.9.5+ server. It did. Good news was that the lesson list corrected itself when it came to sections numbers and that I could add a lesson to topic 1 and move it to where I could not move it before.

I had noticed before that when I attempted to upload a backup course from my local machine, the dependency settings were not pointing to the correct lesson. In the 1.9.5+ site, the backup from the production site seems to consistently point to lessons further along, in the same order. In other words at lesson 2, it is dep[endent on lesson 22 instead of lesson1. Lesson 3 is dependent on lesson 23, Lesson 4 on 24 and I stopped checking.