It’s highly recommended that you upgrade for the usual reason (security). Auto upgrade didn’t work for me, so I performed the upgrade manually and that went off without a hitch. In reviewing the blog’s functionality afterward, I discovered that my categories, blogroll (links) and tags were all missing from sidebar, posts and the backend admin area.

The host of this blog no longer permits customers to use phpmyadmin to access the database directly, so flying blind and depending on a lot of time and assistance from the tech support guy at the host who responded to my ticket, we put our heads together to sort it all out.

Three days later, after scouring the WordPress Codex, The WordPress Forums, and taking a look at the minimum requirements for installing, tech guy and I discovered it was an older version of MySql running on their server that created the inability for blog to communicate fully with the database. Moved to another server, problem solved.

Thank you, tech guy.

It’s worth mentioning that the info on minimum server requirements I found on WordPress.org might be outdated with regard to 2.9.2. That info says the server must be running MySql version 4.1.2 or greater. Host had my blog on a server running 4.1.7 already, but when he moved it to another one running MySQL 5.1.33, that fix worked and solved all database related issues.

That tip was not easily found in my searching, but here’s hoping this will help someone else who runs up against the same issue.