Upgrading Drupal

I just upgraded a few of my sites from 4.7.3 to 4.7.4. Most site upgrades went well. But I have encountered two problems which I have not been able to track down here.

Problem number 1 is that, after upgrading, the settings page links are all gone.
The links for General Settings, Error Handling, etc. The text is there, but the links to expand them are not. I have run through the upgrade a couple more times, just to make certain it is nothing I am doing wrong in that process. I did it the same way it worked successfully on a couple of my other sites.

I am not sure if it is something that I added in my old site, or was it part of the core code...

So if it is part of the core code, where do I turn it on?

If it is a mod, where is the 4.7 vs?

Thanks!

I installed Drupal a couple of years ago, and really don't remember what version it was. So I never know where to look in the upgrade instructions. What's the first thing to do to find out?

Not certain this is entirely due to upgrading, but... I started with 4.7.3 and everything was working fine with the blocks module, after upgrading I started to experience this problem:

We just had our hosting company upgrade our server to PHP 5.2. This is where the problem begins.

I tried to login to our site as admin (user 1) and it takes me to the main admin page as expected. As soon as I hit ANY admin link I am kicked out to a page saying "You are not authorized to access this page." This is terrifying! I know this isn't due to TAC Lite or Simple Access, because our main server doesn't have these modules installed. I cannot access any admin screens with any users we have set up at all.

Please, I need some support on understanding what's going wrong on my attempt to build a copy of my site. look here please.