So what happened?
Between upgrading from wordpress 2.2.2 to 2.3.3 and the following jump to 2.5 I managed to lose all the comments on my posts.
The original 2.2.2 to 2.3.3 upgrade caused some corruption of UTF-8 characters but the comments were still there. Attempting to get to 2.5 to avoid spam attacks left me with no comments at all. They were still there in the database but weren’t being shown.
The installatron control panel couldn’t seem to return me to even the 2.2.2 state so I opted to take the various database backups and rebuild from scratch.
Blog posts and pages are restored (at least for those that get any decent inbound traffic). Now the slightly larger task of cleaning up the comments and re-adding them to the posts.
Comments now restored, phew!

Pingback from [ Irish KC ] » Kansas City Irish Festivals, Music, Pubs, & Events by an Artist in Ireland » Thank You for the Nice Words
Time April 11, 2008 at 5:24 pm
[...] since I’m thanking people, I’ll thank O-Regan too, for the crack [...]