After much wailing and gnashing of teeth I have found what worked for me when setting up a developer environment for RoR:
http://mentalized.net/journal/2006/02/02/kill_the_rails_pluralization/
For some reason, the pluralization feature of Rails was gumming up the works. Once it’s dead I was up and running! Yay!
This is one of those gotchas that should be looked at for upcoming releases. It took me a while to find this solution after looking all over everywhere…