Daniel,
Thanks for replying to my post.  I tried to be brief, and maybe it appeared to be too brief.  Let me try to explain it again.  
First, the "ComplicatedFunction" is to is designed for a numeric input.  A real number.  Giving it a symbolic input will choke it.  The Documentation states:
"FindRoot first localizes the values of all variables, then evaluates f with the variables being symbolic, and then repeatedly evaluates the result numerically."  
This is consistent with my observation that a symbolic variable is passed instead of a numeric value.  The result of the print statement is:
        this is x: x
instead of:
        this is x: 0.83
I googled the problem extensively last night and discovered that mathematica offers a means of limiting the input of a function, and by doing so get it to fail on the symbolic pass.  f(x_} becomes:
f(x_?NumberQ}
This appears to work on for a small test case.  The actual case now gives me an error:
FindRoot::nveq: "The number of equations does not match the number of variables in FindRoot[{radRRunFun[r]==0},{r,radRF$319342}]. 
Let me work on this again and see if I can find a solution on my own.