EIGHTY DOLLARS???  Are you joking with me, or are you completely out of your mind?

EIGHTY DOLLARS!!!  That's 2 weeks worth of groceries!

I only paid $25 for 6 months of Windows hosting; I only pay $75 for a YEAR of unlimited Linux hosting -- both of which I had to budget for VERY carefully!! -- and you somehow think I can just snap my fingers and magically create $80 for a program???

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!!!!!!!  Yeah, you must be out of your mind -- or have more money than sense!

Well Ms. Duncan you did have one thing right - having the DNN "trick up your sleeve" is an exceptional idea. And could actually help your budget issues by being able to offer something your competitors can't. BUT, you are going to have to step up to the pump and actually learn a few things. Expecting everything to auto-magically work without any effort on your part is a bit naive. Yes, some of the things should be working better than they are but with just a little time on your part, with assistance from the folks that have been so nice to invest their time to help you in this forum, you can easily fix the problems you are having.

Yes, for those who are asking, we do in fact test upgrade scenarios with each release.  There are reports of failed upgrades from a number of individuals but we have not been able to successfully reproduce the issues or to isolate the exact causes for those individuals who are affected.  Wtih that said, we also know that thousands of sites upgrade without incident.

The only reason to require a 3rd party module for upgrades is to simplify the backup/recovery process in the case of failed upgrades.

Performing an upgrade is a simple 2 step process (this assumes you already have taken the necessary file and database backups):
1.  Extract the upgrade package over the top of your existing DotNetNuke installation. 
2.  Navigate to any page on the website.  This will trigger the upgrade process which is completely automatic from this point forward.

You do not need to edit release.config or make changes to web.config to perform an upgrade.  This happens automatically.

What are some things to watch out for during upgrade?
1.  Make sure that the zip file completely unzipped.   Some versions of Windows will mark a zip file downloaded from the internet as secure and will not extract the assemblies from the zip during the unzip process.  The easiest way to detect this is to unzip the upgrade package to a staging directory first so you can verify that the appropriate files are in the bin directory.  Then you can just copy this staging directory over the top of your existing DotNetNuke installation.
2.  Make sure that the user account setup in IIS has the apppropriate permissions to your DotNetNuke directories.  Essentially, this account will need read/write/modify on most of your DotNetNuke folders and the web.config file.

If you continue to have problems, I definitely recommend asking for help in these forums.  Just remember that most of the people here are community members who are volunteering their time.  They want to help, but will walk away from a user who is being difficult.  When posting problems it is helpful to try and be as detailed as possible in your problem description as it will help others in diagnosing your problem and providing a solution.

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Joe Brinkman
DNN Corp.