Upgrading Drupal

Hey all, I've been searching to see if anyone else had this issue but not found anything.

Upgraded a drupal 4.7 to 5.3 and discovered that buddylist emails, buddylist invites and ecommerce emails send out untranslated tokens. That is, a user gets an email that reads like this in the case of Buddy adding:
---------
Hi %addee_name,

You are %adder_name's newest buddy on (actual site name appears here)
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The invite module sends out emails that read like this:

ha, someone shoot me now. I will keep it short.

I had a problem with my 4.7 on an old server. Some fool had hacked his way in. OK. Decided to change servers, and upgrade while I was at it. The old server had PHP 4.3 something. The new one has 5. something.

I have switched servers. I have uploaded all the old database data into a new database with the same name but different database user. I have to upload all the data manually, so initially, there is nothing from my old site on the new server.

I foolishly tried to upgrade from 4.7 to 5.1 by using the upgrade link in Fantastico (stupid, yes I know).

I followed the directions to restore my 4.7 site, but am getting a series of error alerts.

I have my database backed up and I have an up-to-date backup of my drupal folder.

Instead of spending a bunch of time trying to figure to fix 4.7 and then still have the issue of an upgrade hanging over my head, would it be easier to simply just start over from scratch with a clean install of 5.x rather than worrying with upgrades?

I have a multisite. The upgrade went allright apart from one thing. In one of the sites I was in Admin modus before the upgrade, but then I clicked Admin as if I wanted to go to the Admin pages again. I immediately got the Offline-page.
Now after the upgrade only one site is accessible. The other doesnt react to www.example.com/admin or whatever.
I went to PhPMyadmin to flip the switch in de Variables table: set it to 0.
But no change, still can't get in. Please help.

Sure! Me Too! Subscribe! Me Too! ;-)

Just upgraded a test copy of my 5.2 site to 5.3.
All went well except one node lost part of its content: the text stops partway through.
This was one of only two nodes in Full HTML input format.