Missing Comments
It's been two months since I attempted, and failed, to successfully upgrade the blog. That attempt was, IIRC, with Wordpress 2.5. Last night I gave it a go with the latest in the 2.6 series. I wound up with the same error I ran into last time. There was no problem viewing the blog, but I couldn't log in to the admin panel. The last time I spent a few days trying to work out a fix, but nothing ever materialized. My posts in the Wordpress support forums went unanswered. This time, I spent a couple of hours with Google and still found no solution.
In the process of rolling back the changes, I had to restore a backup of the database. Once the rollback was complete, I started verifying that everything worked properly. It did. Then I noticed that the most recent comment was dated March 5. I dug into the DB, but comments dated later than that were nowhere to be found. No problem, I thought, the restoration of the backup must have gone bad somehow. So I repeated the process. This time, the most recent comment is dated February 14.
For now, I'm leaving things as they are. The side-effect of the missing comment count on several posts is wrong. Any post subsequent to Feb 14 that indicates comments are present will display none. Some posts prior to that date will still have comments, but the count may be wrong.
Ultimately, I'll dig around and see what I can come up with. The missing comments are almost certainly present in the backup of the DB, so I'll see if I can't pull them out and get it all sorted. It's not a priority, though. So I won't waste too much time on it. A more pressing concern is how in the hell I'm going to upgrade the damn blog. I had never had a problem with the upgrade process prior to 2.5. Now, nothing from 2.5+ works properly for me. I may just export the DB, zap everything, do a fresh install of 2.7 when it's released, and then import the DB. That's the direction I'm heading, at least.