[Paul M]

Originally Posted by OldSchoolDSL

It was agreed upon that I would not obtain a copy until the work was finished and I had paid everything that was due.

To my knowledge, this is standard for most developement. You don't recieve anything until the work is completed and you've paid for the final agreed upon price.

That principle might hold for a tiny project, but not for $3,500, no way should you ever have agreed to that.

The project should have agreed milestones, each representing working features, and payments made and code exchanged for each installment. Indeed, for a project that size I would probably insist on code being checked into something like a shared svn repositry. If either breaks the agreement, you have what you have paid for so far, and they have been paid for the work they have done so far.

Unfortunately, none of this helps you, but hopefully others will learn from it.