Two Questions:

1. Has anyone run across any documentation, blogs, etc. regarding the differences between the DNNSQLMembershipProvider that was used in 4.0.3 and the AspNetSqlMembershipProvider which is in the web.config of the current versions?

2. Is the applicationName element in these provider important?  The default used to be applicationName="/" now it ships with applicationName="DotNetNuke".  For upgrades should this be changed to match the current version?

The reason for these questions is that I ran into difficulties when upgrading from 4.0.3 to 4.3.3 and had to roll back.  some of the issues seemed to be related to the way the asp_ tables were handling authentication based on the application name.

Thanks for the help.

For anyone else who was interested I finally found something:

From Charles Nurse's blog:

Elimination of Reliance on HttpContext

Another area that has been causing Administrators and Module Developers grief, is the reliance of the aspnet implementation on HttpContext (ie you must have  a Context to manipulate the Membership API).  This was due to our implementation of the aspnet modules in an attempt to virtualise users between portals.

However, we have decided that the problems with this approach far outweigh the benefits of vitualisation (users are virtualised in our own UserPortals table anyway).

As a result, in the next release we will set a fixed Application Name "DotNetNuke" and update all existing users to this new mechanism.