J. Kissel, J. Driggers, T. Schaffer [E. Hall and S. Dwyer remotely]

Right after finally getting through XARM initial alignment, we advanced to the PRM initial alignment state, and found the ALIGN_IFO guardian manager erroring out. It was relatively easy to trace the problem to 
/opt/rtcds/userapps/release/isc/h1/guardian/lscparams.py
which ALIGN_IFO was expecting to define a variable "prm_m2_cross_over". We found that this definition had been commented out of the code (on line 27), yet 
(a) there were no svn diffs, 
(b) the last time the file was touched was Oct 13 (by Evan), and 
(c) we've done initial alignment several times since Oct 13th.
A call to Evan and Shiela revealed that they were just as baffled as to how this could have possibly worked for 7 days as we were. 

At their advice, we uncommented the variable definition, reloaded the guardian code, and the state succeeded admirably, without error. #facepalm

We could try to come up with some boogey-man, malicious theories involving power outtages and gremlins as to how this could possibly be true, but instead we move on with our day.

The functional lscparams.py with the uncommented, well-defined prm_m2_cross_over has now been committed to the userapps repo.

30 minutes ... *flush*