Found the problem. Must have been a change in pydal or web2py grid (I didn't research) but a simple fix.
I'll submit a PR to py4web for a fix, but not sure how quickly Massimo can merge. Seems like he has some merge plans for this weekend.
In the grid in master on github, lines 1665 and 1666 need to change from:
if parent_id and "&" in parent_id:
parent_id = parent_id.split("&")[0]
to:
if parent_id and "&" in str(parent_id):
parent_id = str(parent_id).split("&")[0]
parent_id in some instances cannot be evaluated as a string and I'm performing str() functions against it. Not sure if something changed in pydal or py4web that caused this, but the fix is pretty simple.
-Jim