I need to create a child but when I do this I lose all current theme options.
Worse, while I can save and see that the theme options are saved, they don’t do anything and the front end just look like the out of the box corporate theme.
I’m following WordPress best practices for creating a child theme. what am I missing?
When you create a child theme it creates a separate table in the database and considers a new theme that is the reason the theme options data restore. Are you using a plugin for it?