I booted up with the installation DVD and went into "rescue mode". I then activated the volume group for the root filesystem, mounted root and chrooted so that I essentially have the same system as when I boot normally. The only difference is the kernel. I tried rsync and ssh for tests again and this time they worked. The kernel from the installation DVD is linux-2.6.28-11-generic and my normal kernel is linux-2.6.28-3-rt with SMP and RT optimizations.
So I used aptitude to install linux-2.6.28-11-generic kernel and headers and rebooted. The transfers now work. However, in the long run, this is not ideal since I need the RT optimizations for composing music and SMP optimizations wouldn't hurt for audio and video work. So now I need to see if I can narrow the problem down a bit more to see if I can file a bug report. Anyone know how to do that in Ubuntu land?