Sad when you have to reply to yourself…
Anway, it turns out that when I used wireshark to examine communication between my ADOBE AIR
application that runs jquery/jqgrid from within…. I saw an OLD debug message getting appended to my JSON string.
As soon as I removed that the grid loaded.
SO……….. Please let others know that if firebug is NOT an option that wireshark examination of communication between
the client (jqgrid) and the upstream server will ALSO show you POST/REPONSE messages….