Upgrading Drupal

I tried posting this one earlier but got no response. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks.

Can someone explain to me why proper quotation marks (‘’) are saved in mysql in the form of ’ or something like it? I am using Drupal 4.2. Output to a browser is fine but I did a trial upgrade to cvs and they came out (viewed in Mozilla, IE is different but no better) as �(tm) (and variations on that theme). Is this something to do with magic_quotes?

Can't seem to solve this:

[code]
user error: Unknown column 'c.thread' in 'field list'
query: SELECT c.cid as cid, c.pid, c.nid, c.subject, c.comment, c.timestamp, u.uid, u.name, u.data, c.score, c.users, c.thread FROM comments c INNER JOIN users u ON c.uid = u.uid WHERE c.nid = '15' AND c.status = 0 GROUP BY c.cid, c.pid, c.nid, c.subject, c.comment, c.timestamp, u.uid, u.name, u.data, c.score, c.users, c.thread ORDER BY c.thread DESC LIMIT 0, 50 in (...)/public_html/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 90.
[/code]

any suggestions?