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The .htaccess looks like the stock Joomla! .htaccess file. Nothing special over here.

A few things I can think of:
- Did you restore the Joomla! 2.5 site on top of an existing Joomla! 1.5, 1.6 or 1.7 site? If so, delete all files and redo the restoration. You can not restore a site with a different Joomla! version than an existing site without removing the existing site's files first.
- Which PHP version did your previous host have? I see that your new host has PHP 5.2.17 which is end of life since January 2011. It is possible that you have extensions which only work with PHP 5.3, hence the problem.

If this doesn't help you will have to do some debugging yourself. A white page or a page with a 500 Internal Server Error is, in fact, either a .htaccess issue to a PHP fatal error in disguise.

First, let's see if it is a .htaccess issue. Try renaming the .htaccess file in your site's root to htaccess.bak If there is a .htaccess file in the site's administrator directory, try renaming it as well. If that solves the problem, the issue was with a directive in your .htaccess file. We'd like to recommend you to try removing directives from your .htaccess until you find the one which causes the problem.

If that doesn't help, the error you are receiving is in fact a PHP error in disguise. First, check your server's error logs (not the access logs) immediately after visiting the page which throws the error. There should be an exact description of the PHP fatal error which occurred. Sometimes you can find the error messages in files called error_log or error.log inside the site's root and/or administrator directories. If unsure about the error log location, please consult your host. Most likely the error logs are available in your site's cPanel, Plesk control panel or similar hosting account management facility.

If your host does not give you access to the error logs and you have access to the Joomla! administrator area, please log in to your site's back-end, go to Global Configuration, click on the Server tab and set the Error Reporting to Maximum (Joomla! 1.5) or Development (Joomla! 2.x and later). Try visiting the problem page again.

If you still get a blank page, edit your configuration.php file and put the following code right after the final closing curly brace ( this is what a curly brace looks like --> } ) but before the closing PHP tag (it looks like ?> that is a question mark and a greater-than sign):

ini_set( 'display_errors', true );
error_reporting( E_ALL ); 

Try visiting the problem page again.

If you still get a white page, please remote the two lines from your configuration.php file. Edit the .htaccess file in your site's root. If you don't have a file named .htaccess create a new one. Beware that htaccess.txt is a DIFFERENT FILE and will NOT work! Add the following to the end of the file:

php_flag display_errors On
php_value error_reporting 32767

and retry loading the problem page.

If you still get a white page, remove the two lines from your .htaccess file. Now, create a file called php.ini with the following content:

display_errors=on
error_reporting=E_ALL

and upload it into your site's root and your site's administrator directory. Retry loading the problem page.

If you still get a white page, delete the php.ini files your created and choose a different host. If your host doesn't allow you to debug any PHP-related issues there is no point paying them.

Please note that if you can not understand what the PHP error message means, just copy and paste it here verbatim so that we can take a look and point you to the right direction.

You analysis at the end of your reply is very accurate:

? I can only surmise that 1) the lack of a space caused the blank white page problem or 2)the shared server service's tech made some other modification on the server side.

This is exactly what I understand as well.

If you are tight on disk space you can extract the backup archive locally, using Akeeba eXtract Wizard, then upload all files to your site and access the installation script as http://www.example.com/installation/index.php where www.example.com is the domain name of your site.

The only thing which confuses me is this part:

the tech stated he felt problem was .htaccess to he commented out each line in the file and the site worked great. He then removed the hashes, site still worked fine and closed the ticket. He suggested I remove any unneeded code from .htaccess file.

This does sound like voodoo. Your site did not have a .htaccess to begin with. Commenting and uncommenting the same lines results in zero net change. There is nothing in here which can explain why the site wasn't working and now it does.

This all gets me thinking that either the tech did something he didn't say, perhaps restart the web server.

This line is commented out, so it doesn't do anything. All lines starting with a hash sign (#) are considered comments and completely ignored. You don't need to know what that line does when uncommented. It tells the Apache web server to follow symbolic links as if they were real files or folders. OK, I know you don't understand any of that. The good news is that if you don't know what a symbolic link is you don't need to use this line.