Sorry for starting another thread about Fantastico but I think I should share this.
I installed Drupal 5.1 about a year ago using Fantastico De Lux. After reading several threads about Fantastico I decided to uninstall Drupal using Fantastico and then install the latest version (without using Fantastico, since Fantastico doesn't support the latest version). However, Fantastico didn't have an uninstall option, just an update option to 5.3, so I thought why not give it a try?
First there was a warning that I should not upgrade if I have installed modules. I have in fact installed several modules, for instance cck, views, link, adsense and codefilter, but anyway... this is what I did.
1. Make sure all modules are up-to-date (not sure if this is necessary)
2. Backup the database using phpMyAdmin
3. Backup the files in the public_html directory (the root of my Drupal installation)
4. Run the Fantastico update
5. Run update.php (seemed to be part of the Fantastico update)
6. Copy all the modules to the modules directory
7. Run update.php again
So far this seem to have worked like a charm. Plain luck?
Of course the site was in a partly broken state during steps 4-7, but since it's a small site I think nobody noticed.