So IIS v6 wasn’t letting form variables post. <cfdump var="#form#"> would show an empty structure. CF’s built-in webserver on the development box worked fine. Changing the method from post to get made things even stranger with the query string using & instead of &. I finally found the solution. I had used the obscure html tag <base"
<base href="http://domain.com/">
IIS v6 did not like this. Removing that one line fixed the problem. So much for trying to be the perfect coder.