Thanks so much for the help Brian and Bill!  I'll get back with the developers this morning.

I got the following trying to restore msdb until I applied the hotfix that I had applied on the original server to the destination server. 

Server: Msg 3168, Level 16,...

Thanks - I'll find out what the versions are.

We had trouble when our backup software moving the database backup to tape had trouble and the file remained open.  As long as it was open, our SQL backup would complete...

Problem solved.  Distribution cleanup job was not running.   Recordcount is now less than 1000.

Thanks to both of you for your help. I need to get the rest of the details on the project, but now I understand how to approach this.