That's weird.  And shocking.  I would really hope that something like a db call would not be involved in a template, and I can't see anywhere in the template or the javascript where that might be happening.  

But even if that were the case, I don't see why that would cause a transaction error, either before or after the commit-manual/with-manual-transaction was added.  If that's true, then all db calls must happen within 'progress()' and none be outside.

That said, I'm willing to let this go.