Finally Upgraded
I've finally managed to get a successful upgrade to a very recent version of Wordpress. After the last failed attempt, I decided to go about it differently. I'll tell you what I did in case you run into trouble in the future.
First, I went into the admin panel to the manage menu and exported the database. This isn't quite the same as backing up the DB, but it pulls out all of the relevant data for each post and the comments on each. I then renamed the blog directory. At this point, I could have (and likely should have) backed up the DB.
Originally, I had installed Wordpress via fantastico in CPanel. However, I've been upgrading manually ever since, rather than letting fantastico do it for me. At some point, I managed to delete the file list that fantastico leaves lying around. So the installation was showing up in the fantastico panel as being unknown and manual upgrade only. Without considering the ramifications, I clicked on remove in the fantastico panel. I then slapped myself in the head when I realized that it deleted the database it had originally created. From that point, the only copy of my posts and approved comments was in the file I had exported from Wordpress. If anything had gone wrong with that, I'd have lost the entire history of this blog.
Next, I created a fresh install of the most recent version of Wordpress available to me through fantastico. Once it all was set up, I then went into the admin panel to import the file I had exported earlier. Unfortunately, since the file weighed in at 2.06 MB, it was just over the 2MB limit my host has configured for file uploads in php.ini. As a work around, I cut a portion of text from the export file and saved it in a new file, making sure to copy over the header as well and to add the footer back onto the original. I then imported the original file successfully, followed by the new one.
Once both files were imported, I held my breath and found that everything seems to be in order on first blush. The comment counts on the posts that were screwed up after the last failed upgrade are now correct. Those comments are still missing, though I think I may have found them in the DB backup I did before. It's going to take some effort to parse them out of the backup file and restore them, so I doubt I'll bother.
Anyway, the export->import process went off quite well with the only glitch being the upload limit. Fortunately, the xml format Wordpress uses for the exported file is quite easy to read, so splitting it up is not a problem.
So far, I'm really liking the admin controls in this version of WP. I'm thinking that I'm going to go back through all of my old posts and remove all of the technorati tags--they just annoy me now--and replace them all with WP tags. I've also stopped using ScribeFire to edit blog posts. The interface on the admin panel is much nicer than before. And I'm rather tired of ScribeFire. A few versions back it started causing the browser to hang for seconds at a time during some operations. I've finally lost patience with it.
I'll be looking at installing a new theme soon. In the meantime, if you notice any issues with the blog please let me know.