Progress! In the unrelenting march to some ideal, feature rich, future we have to occasionally update the WordPress software which normally amounts to clicking on the Automatic Update link and waiting a moment for the updater to do its thing. Alas the 3.1 update did not do its thing and the blog was broken; left bereft with only the message:

Unable to even log in to see what the problem was I turned to my trusty FTP software to get into the blog. The usual suspects are the plugins which add myriad enhancements but will often cause as many problems. Renaming the plugins folder, so WordPress will not recognise it, allowed me to get to the login screen; and once in I was greated with the message

Clicking the link to run the updater again successfully updated WordPress. Moving all the plugins back into the newly created plugins folder showed that it was not the plugins at fault this time but the errors seemed to be from my own child theme. So we are now back with a hacked about a bit Twenty Ten theme which will break when the next update comes along. Ho hum.

Seems there have been a few problems with the update.