Tidbits learned during this calibration:

Missing vpd channel #8 did have an effect on the stop side(tof) calibration and on the reading in of the start side(vpd) calibration parameters.  This was corrected by excluding channel 8 from the calibration.

The problem was caused by the dead channel starting with 0 listed for its first TOT bin value in the pvpd calibration parameters.  This allowed for zeroed out correction values to pass the binning selection criteria in the outlier rejection.  So this did not change the start calibration parameters, but rather the reading in of the parameters and the resulting event start times.