Upgrading Drupal

From where does the "Admin -> Logs -> Status" page get the Drupal version number?

After updating my multi-site Drupal installation from v5.7 to v5.17, the main site still reports the version number at 5.7 -- even though the other site in the installation correctly reports v5.17 on its status page.

The following download is provided for those users who do not want to overwrite all of the files in their Drupal 6.11 installation. Using a file comparison utility, the following zip file contains only the date modified files for the latest release of Drupal 6.12.

Upload the new files to your Drupal site, then log into your site as the administrator and run update.php.

I am looking for a solution to copy all D5 user generated content (nodes, tags, users etc) to my D6 upgrade while it is under testing, as the site-owner does not want to dual publish or take the site down for more than a second! Is there any standard way of doing this that avoids

a) Loss of service on the site
b) Loss of data
c) Any data structure complications from D5 to D6
d) Regulary importing large chunks of data (prone to error (not me, the process!))

Any thoughts appreciated.

I have five operational Drupal sites, but one will not upgrade even though my upgrade procedures are the same for all of my sites. Has anyone had a similar problem or can you offer any troubleshooting ideas?

I everyone,

I am new to drupal and when I upgraded my site from 6.11 to 6.12 I lost my theme background. I now see all my pages but with a white background. It's like the .css is not read or something like that

thx

Is it recommendable to upgrade from version 6.60 directly to 6.12 or should we go incremental (6.6->6.7->6.9...)?
Are there any new processes and steps to follow or just the old method?
I will read the instructions, just want some feedback from users with hands-on experience.

Finally I wish there would be a seamless upgrade process. I have more than a dozen sites with Drupal and upgrade is a real time consuming process and somewhat risky.

thanks!