Upgrading Drupal

I've put this into the upgrade forum as I can only assume it's not a co-incidence that this happened while I was trying to upgrade another site to 4.7.

My live site currently runs 4.6.6. I decided this weekend to try and upgrade to 4.7. I expected there to be problems so I created a copy of my live site in a subfolder of my webspace (my live site lives in the root folder currently), exported a copy of the database and loaded it into a seperate on. I changed the base url to point to the subfolder of the upgrade subfolder site and pointed it towards the separate database. In my head I now have two seperate sites running off 2 different databases so I could safely try and upgrade the subfolder site while leaving my main live site untouched.

This was possibly mistake number one.

I proceeded to try to upgrade and failed (as expected) with many errors but I figured that the main live site was still ok so I had nothing to worry about and a quick look at the main site made me think that it was still ok.

Mistake number two methinks.

This morning, one of my users added a post which made me take another look at it in detail and I now find that some of my links where image assist has inserted code for thumbnails have broken. It just leaves the filter code displayed in the post rather than replaceing it with the thumbnail. The files still exist in the files folder and you can still see them in the galleries ok. If you edit one of the broken posts you can get image assist to load and insert an appropriate code but when you subsequently submit the post, the broken code remains. The really odd thing is that in some cases the links are ok and the thumnails from image assist work fine. It doesn't seem to be time dependent.

When I first created my Drupal DB, back in the 4.4.x days, I used PhpMyAdmin. Apparently that was a bad idea, since it has a bug that it ignores the encoding of the imported schema. This was never a problem, though, and I never noticed that my schema as latin1_swedish_ci until a week ago when I decided to try 4.7 -- which made all my accents look like random text.

Dear friends,

I just updated to 4.7 and now i am having so many problems with the layout. I figured out it is drupal that is reformating the html to screw up all my posts. If you embed an object such as a flash .swf drupal will do this

I've tried to upgrade from 4.5.x to 4.6.x several times and it fails every time. Now with 4.7 being released, I felt a real urgency to accomplish this feat. So last night I tried again. I was following the Upgrading from Previous Versions howto (4.5 to 4.6.3) last night and although the update.php step went fine - all okays, I still got an error when I tried to happily go to administration pages.

Past errors escape me, but the showstopper last night was:

Hi, i'm getting the

Multibyte string input conversion in PHP is active and must be disabled. Check the php.ini mbstring.http_input setting. Please refer to the PHP mbstring documentation for more information.

Error on the settings page.

My host is unable to disable this in my htaccess because of something to do with it being an apache module instead of proper php. They are also unwilling to disable it on the machine because of the other clients. (I'm with Lonex)

Is there no way i can stop drupal complaining about this?