Drupal Block-edit module reconfiguration causing content editiing tabs to disappear

While working on a fairly large site with multiple CCK node-types and extensive use of views along with lots of other modules, I noticed that the usual tabs that appear at the top of each node had disappeared (view, edit, workflow, track, clone etc). Initially, I thought that it was a CSS theming issue, but I used Firebug and I saw that the values were not in the markup. Looking online (drupal.org etc) pointed me to "pathauto" as the offending partly. Since I had attempted some fairly complex implementations of Panels with multiple contexts from arguments, I decided to temporarily disable, and even at one point uninstalled all these modules and their databases (on a sandbox server obviously) without success.

This morning, I noticed that if I disable the node 'view' option in the configuration of the "block edit" module, that alone makes the edit tabs disappear. Re-enabling and DB schema updates or any other refresh (cron, cache etc) does not solve the problem.

Luckily for me, I learned the lesson with the first occurrence (I had to roll-back to an older DB), and so since I now have "backup and migrate" creating backups every 10 minutes (during the development phase), I was able to recover with only 7 minutes of history lost. Needless to say, I promptly uninstalled and discarded this module that had caused me so much agony and toil.

I will do some more research on this issue and see if/why this module seems to be affecting an unrelated feature in Drupal 6