that // bug is part of the bug I mentioned in my earlier post. the problem is in line 215 of /modules/sytem/xoops_version.php which reads looking at that with more sleep in me it seems that it $xoopsConfig['language'] is not returning "english" properly. my stated workaround was to change the line to

I was getting all kinds of:

ERROR: Could not insert config category general to the database.
ERROR: Could not insert config category meta to the database.
ERROR: Could not insert config category censor to the database.
ERROR: Could not insert config category search to the database.
ERROR: Could not insert config category mail to the database.
ERROR: Could not insert config category auth to the database.

style errors. So I dumped my DB and tried again, this time actually looking at the php errors. (I really didn't want to hand edit my DB). There was some warnings, I'll assume they were benign and then I found an actual error, something about /modules/system/xoops_version.php and not being able to open language file /language//notifications.php or something really similar. I realized my language isn't // so perhaps that might be it. So I opened up /modules/system/xoops_version.php and did a search for language. Bam there it was. line 215. Some php code that was supposed to extract the language and insert it into the path. Well it wasn't doing it's job very well since I got errors so I changed my file to:

include_once XOOPS_ROOT_PATH . "/language/english/notification.php";

and gave it an try with my restored DB. No warnings even. Well that's good. Click update. Scan quickly.... No red.
Hurrah for me. this is more of a workaround than a fix, but I think it's a bug since I've seen those error messages floating around the forums. So, hopefully this can get squished, and until then feel free to try my kludge, I don't guarantee anything.

P.S. how do I do those cool code block thingies? It would probably make things more readable if I knew anything about forums and layout.... sorry for my ignorance there.