I completely changed the mysql engine type for the troublesome tables to MyISAM. InnoDB was crashing with an unspecified error. My only concern is right now that is I'm not too sure how reliant vBulletin was on the special indexing features of InnoDB to make sure people are provided with the right search results. We'll see what happens. And btw, there were extra indexes in the database for templates and phrases. I inadvertently fixed this while trying to fix the database errors, so templates are saved much quicker now and it doesn't take 10 years to search for vBulletin phrases.

Told u there was something with the database.... lol.
it'll happen again, I fixed the tables once before...