cron runs "command line" and knows nothing about server settings, such as .htaccess. I'm surprised that the upgrade didn't take you to a default PHP 5 (on both server and cron), but if you look around I'm sure you'll find the instructions for using php5 with cron (or have you been running with them already?). Maybe the default PHP 5 is scheduled to come later? You could ask.

What I should have done is write a little script that calls phpversion() and run it off the cron tab. That's what I did and it returned version 5.2.14.

Here's the cron command:

So it's running 5.2.14 in 'default' mode off the cron tab.

Here's what's really odd. I've been running with a modified .htaccess in the root to run PHP 5 as follows:

When I commented that out of the .htaccess, the system reverted back to PHP 4.4.9. I went into the cPanel to PHP Configuration, set the pulldown in the new theme to run *php in PHP 5 and the domain was running 5.2.14 as 'default' (with the commands in the .htaccess commented out).

What I learned about this is users on upgraded cPanel servers have to go into the cPanel PHP Configuration to change the default PHP version for their site, however, they don't need to take any action to use PHP 5 off the the cron tab. I think this is a good implementation by LP even though the way it was rolled out was a little vague. I had the opinion that I didn't need to do anything to run PHP 5 natively but that's not the case.

So if you use just php on the cron command line, you definitely get PHP 5, but if you run from the Web server without the AddHandler/AddType stuff, you definitely get PHP 4? Quite strange. Does your cPanel have a button to switch between PHP 4 and 5? Have you been informed that PHP 5 is supposed to be the default now for both Web and cron? Have you checked that all your .htaccess files don't have anything pertaining to PHP version (AddHandler and/or AddType entries)? Make sure you don't have anything forcing PHP back to version 4 for Web usage.

Report of PHP going back from 5.2 to 4.4 all by itself: http://www.lunarforums.com/web_hosting_help_and_troubleshooting/problem_with_bahalunarbreeze_customer_support_issue-t55534.0.html

It is quite weird that you are experiencing this. in fact, if you have a upgrade, regardless of automatic upgrades or manual ones that you downloaded through the internet, it should be working fine and upgrade everyone of it as well, not only the core program. In fact, I recommend you downloading the files again manually and try it out see the results. See whether I will help on solving the problems or not. I bet it will as now there is a problem with compatibility.