What a pain that upgrade was....it kept change files and directories to really weird permissions. Like setting perms on index.php to 0, or themes directory and the themes/default directory to 311 (d-wx--x--x), and changing the parameter for CHMOD_VALUE to an $conf['CHMOD'] which is undefined...from its previous value of 0755. There were other places it had changed to perms to 0, etc. It was also complaining that it wanted log files to be 0600, but they are set to 0600...except for debug.log which it had changed to 0.
Eventually, I cleaned up the mess and as soon as I got the setup to show the go button, I clicked....ignoring the other warnings...such as mysql with hosting provider meets minimum requirements but not preferred. or that it thinks files already set to strict perms is wrong and that I should set them to strict (which was part of why things were being changed to no perms at all....)
Things seem to be working again.
I think I should get back to hunting down photos and filling in the empty albums, and see if other photo sets should go up....