[masraum]

No, I don't have hot/ground reversed. It's just not the case.

The house was built in 1967.

With all of the switches for the 3 overhead boxes turned off and nothing plugged into any of the outlets the tester shows "open neutral". That's what the real problem is.

If you do a search on the internet for "hot ground reversed" you'll get several hits where folks had a circuit die, and then got the "hot/ground reversed" and then managed to fix the open neutral that they had.

I don't think that circuits that have tested good and been working fine for 40 years spontaneously rewire themselves.

When you think about it getting the ground and hot connections reversed would be pretty darn hard to do, especially when you had a working circuit and then it stops working and you havent touched a thing. The reason you get this hot/ground reverse as I understand is that with other loads plugged in to the circuit...lights, battery chargers etc when your neutral opens somewhere in the circuit you can actully read 120 volts from neutral to ground from backfeed through these other loads on the circuit.