Aside from needing to manually patch the buggy comment.module thanks to this very very old bug:
https://drupal.org/node/97327
...upgrading from 6.20 to 6.22 exposed a SQL error in the system/user.module roundabout line 789 on my PostgreSQL configuration.
The error:
pg_query(): Query failed: ERROR: column "s.timestamp" must appear in the GROUP BY clause or be used in an aggregate function LINE 1: ...559 AND s.uid > 0 GROUP BY u.uid, u.name ORDER BY s.timestam... ^ in /www/drupal/[deleted]-6.22/includes/database.pgsql.inc on line 138.
The query:
query: SELECT u.uid, u.name, MAX(s.timestamp) AS timestamp FROM users u INNER JOIN sessions s ON u.uid = s.uid WHERE s.timestamp >= 1325818559 AND s.uid > 0 GROUP BY u.uid, u.name ORDER BY s.timestamp DESC LIMIT 10 OFFSET 0 in /www/drupal/farbot-6.22/modules/user/user.module on line 789.
The solution:
modify user/user.module so that the line 789 query goes from this:
// Display a list of currently online users.
$max_users = variable_get('user_block_max_list_count', 10);
if ($authenticated_count && $max_users) {
$authenticated_users = db_query_range('SELECT u.uid, u.name, MAX(s.timestamp) AS timestamp FROM {users} u INNER JOIN {sessions} s ON u.uid = s.uid