Upgrading Drupal

Hello everyone. I am relatively new to the site and Drupal. I have installed Drupal V6.3 on a shared hosting environment and all is going well. I need help with understanding how the Views module works. I have read lots of tutorials and tried searching this sites forums but I just can't seem to find what I am looking for.

I want to set up a simple calendar of "Events" and thought I could use the views module to do so. The part I am having trouble understanding is how do I get my data in the database and how do I retrieve that data using views.

I've tried to do database update (update.php) in my 2 Drupal 5.8 sites (one was upgraded from 5.7 and one is a fresh install). The update.php seems unable to proceed the updating process on both sites and showed the following same errors in both cases:

on Updating page shows:
An unrecoverable error has occured. You can find the error message below. It is advised to copy it to the clipboard for reference. Please continue to the update summary
An HTTP error 501 occured. update.php?op=do_update

This happened when I upgraded from an earlier version also...

When I upgraded from 6.2 to 6.3 (using Fantastico at my ISP) my (1) added modules and (2) custom logo got lost. That happened last time I upgraded too.

They were easy enough to replace, but... Am I doing something wrong?

Should I keep my added modules and custom logo someplace special in order to prevent them from getting overwritten during an upgrade?

Thanks,

doug

Following an upgrade to my site from 5.x to 6.3 I'm now getting the WSOD (White Screen of Death) on the admin build modules and sometimes on the clear cache page. I've increased my memory limit to 64mb and this is confirmed via phpinfo as suggested (http://drupal.org/node/158043). On my test server the admin build modules runs fine, but the live site is hosted with FastHosts on a load balanced server and I've got limited access to the server settings.

Since I am just installing drupal for the first time... does anyone who has updated have an issue with the drupalbreak plugin for tinymce module and engine: 3.1.0.1?

Hope that all makes sense.

After upgrading Drupal 5.7 to 5.8 my tabbed blocks and vote block are broken.

The tabbed blocks are supposed to show side by site and the vote block is supposed to show flame icons instead of the numerical rank.

The strange thing is they work fine on any other place than the main rows on front page. If placed in the left sidebar on front page they show up fine.

The issue seems to be certain css are missing when placed in the main row on the front page.