What are those unconnected pins across the top of the board labelled "A0", "A1" etc?

That's the nature of a jack - almost guaranteed to short soemthing to something else.

and with all 4 motors on, and the servo, the current is .05mA

I find that very hard to believe.

The current by itself is .04 mA according to my multimeter.

Time to look for a new meter

Tamiya motors were mostly 540s IIRC.
3V through a current limiter isn't going to budge them.

Never heard of a negative address

Really?
You have lived a sheltered life.
The Inmos transputer had an address space that began at MOSTNEG INT.

Also one of the joys of C is that negative indices are allowed in array accesses - really useful for table lookups.

Who's talking about datatypes?
I'm talking about memory, as in "my Arduino has 1k bytes of SRAM".

Need a bigger hammer to get -50 into a byte.

I must have a really big hammer - my bytes store -128 to 127.    8-)

sp  'analog[glow]W[/glow]rite'

http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/AnalogWrite

Old CRT TVs will get you to around 25kV, but please, read all they said.
You're going to be hard-pressed to get up to 50kV from 5 or 9V - for just 1mA at 50kV, you'll have to start with in excess of 10A at 5V.

I then replaced the pre-programmed ATmega 328 with a blank one

A really blank one?

You need to write the bootloader into it.

No problem with 0017 or 0018.
What are you using?

It's an accelerometer

What is?
A 3x4 keypad?

Don't I need the inByte option

You don't need to read it into a variable if you're not using it anywhere else, you could just put the "Serial.read" in the "switch".
(I was only slightly joking, hence the wink)

What do you mean by ex-servo?

I mean it used to be a servo, but it isn't anymore.
It is a geared DC motor with a convenient single wire direction and possible speed control.

I tried 255, still nothing.

Check your wiring.
Maybe add some debug prints to make sure your program is going where you think it is.

so I changed the value to be written to be like 1000 or so

1000 .. out of 255?
http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/AnalogWrite

[edit]Oops, re-read my own post - make the HIGH write just 0.4%

Also, if yours is an ex-servo, the "stop" point should be around the 90 "degree" mark, so to move one way or the other, you need to write, say, 80 or 100.[/edit]

Why is inByte in parentheses?

Why is it there at all?