Further to the comments in Ticket #5163, and as per request by mickecarlsson
Asterisk was installed from asterisk-1.8 svn branch on a fresh install of Debian Squeeze using freedoh (~0.5.3.5?) http://freedoh.net
FreePBX 2.8.1 was installed from tarball. The system was 100% working, and the few modules that were installed were all up to date.
The upgrade to 2.9 was performed using the 2.9 upgrade tool, and all instructions were followed to the letter.
The symptom of failure from the end-user view is that the Recordings page is blank.
Error is as reported in the ticket.