All, thank you all for your help. With your help, I have been able to get things working with a few work arounds. here is what I ended up doing:
- Since I was getting certificate errors, upgrading to the 1.8 SDK enabled me to run packp3d.
- Then, I was getting an error on makensis which prohibited my pdeploy with an installer option to work.
- I found a work around which I posted here (Failure invoking NSIS command)
Thank you all for your time and hard work!