Unfortunately I changed the db password because I couldn't recall it. Now, presumably because of the security provision storing the database connection parameters somewhere outside of the mainfile, I seem to be really locked out. That upgrade has moved up the priority tree.
Looking around in phpmyadmin I see that icms consists of a second db piggybacking the original xoops install and the xoops db seems to be carrying all of the module stuff as well as the original user table.
Perhaps reverting to xoops is little more than deleting the icms db from a backup, copying the modules over to a new xoops directory, running the xoops upgrade, then loading the module specific tables back and running the module update
Its pretty brave but I may have to try it if there are no better ideas.
Lee
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Complexity? Its just lots of simple things connected in lots of simple ways...