The only time you'll lose changes to your themes is if you have modified the themes that originally come with joomla and wordpress.  Upgrading will overwrite those but the easiest thing to do is backup your themes and then upgrade.  That way even if it does change the themes you can upload your modified versions.

I am the same way.  I would rather stick with what I know works.  Yet after three days of emails reminding me to upgrade, I finally did.

Yep, my site is now screwed up.  Sigh.  I guess I'll go througgh the proper channels and see what's up, but I am VERY disappointed in LP.

www.MVPFitness.com/365

Well...  No, I have not made a full backup in about a month.  I did not think it necessary since just before doing the upgrade it said

"Please save following information. You will need it in order to restore if something went wrong."

I did save that information, assuming it was what I needed in order to fix any problems that might come up.  I am hoping that is still the case.  There is no way I am starting over with this thing.

From reading the wordpress.org site, it seems that fantastico is crap and all upgrades should be done manually.  That would have been nice to know from LP before it was done.  Why am I upset at them?  That is just one reason.  Here you are a "Global Moderator" and even YOU didn't use the auto upgrade supplied by LP.  That's a clue to me when the people working here have to go outside what a normal customer is given.  I am not programmer savvy obviously.  When I am told by my host to upgrade, I just did it.  Should I not be able to assume it won't screw up my site?

I am also upset that when I talk to customer service, I am pointed to an outside site to find the answers myself.  I still don't see what needs changed in the headers, and I've been searching and readin for a while now.  I'm more confused than when I started.  The guy could have at least pointed me to the page.  He said he had it in front of him and I shoul find it no problem.  Sure, maybe if I knew exactly what I was looking for.

Yes, I am very frustrated.  I didn;t have teh time for this tonight, and I've already spent a few hours trying to figure this out.

The first guy I spoke with at customer service told me I had to insert something into the headers.  He said he had the exact lines of code in front of him and I just needed to search wordpress for it.  he could have helped and given me the address.  The problem was that I had no idea what even to search for since I was not savvy enough to even understand the problem in the first place.  After reading an hour or so, I called back and spoke with someone else.

He told me I should have backed the stuff up and basically I was screwed (not in those words).  I guess the problem has something to do with the character sets UTF-8 vs. latin1.  I'm already lost explaining it to you.  Anyway, from what I was told, a backup was made when I upgraded, but not of the database.  Apparently the problems were embedded in the db and going back won't now fix the problem.  Screwed.

Ok, I searched on the WP site and found at least 10 different solutions.  Something about exporting to an XML, or redoing the install, or making it a blob then something else, then back to a blob (no idea what that means).  I finally foudn one solution that was actually simple enough for me to follow.

Find the wp_config file and comment out two lines of code.

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

I did that and it worked.  Occam's razor (or at least an adaptation of it).  The simplest solution worked the best.

So it SEEMS things are back in order.  I am awful glad the first guy at LP didn't have me changing code in my headers.  I would be knee deep into it and lost by now.

Anyway, I've calmed down, made a backup of my site, and know now to manually install all upgrades.  I've learned something.

Thank you.

Amusing.  I just upgraded to 2.5.1 and had the same problems.  I guess they haven't fixed that in the last year.

At least the same solution fixed the problem again.  I am bumping t his in case anyone has similar problems.