Wordpress’s ‘Upgrade to 2·8·1’ button looks innocent, but isn’t

Last week, we upgraded to Wordpress 2·8. Admittedly, this was an improvement over the previous 2·6. and it restored my faith a little in computing. (Wordpress 2·6 was progressively buggier by the week.)
   Given that 2·8 worked quite well, I pressed, today, the ‘Upgrade to 2·8·1’ button on the Wordpress desktop today. Bad idea.
   After a long wait with the words ‘Reading lucire.com’ at the bottom of the browser in the status bar and nothing else happening, I opened up other web windows to find out how long this should take. Most users agreed this should take a minute, not 10 to 15. Eventually, since Firefox reported that it was ‘Reading’ and not ‘Writing’, I stopped the process. Another bad idea.
   This corrupted the entire set-up which meant I had to install the entire Wordpress package from scratch. Luckily, our database was left intact. However, the dashboard was unusable, with all its CSS specifications gone, looking like a second-rate website from the early 1990s. Reloads could not restore it.
   After the reinstallation, the dashboard was still munted, despite reloads. I ran the install.php line as Wordpress’s manual instructed. This is a lesson I never learn. Never, ever trust the manual, especially when computers are concerned.
   I got the message, ‘You appear to have already installed WordPress. To reinstall please clear your old database tables first.’
   If you Google this error message, you get all sorts of recommendations about deleting PHP tables and whatnot. Basically, it is a serious error. I was already worried, and instinctively I knew that deleting things was a bad idea.
   Real solution in layman’s language: go to the dashboard. Reload it. Problem solved. No deleting PHP tables, going into PHPMyAdmin, etc., necessary.
   Hopefully, the above will save someone some grief because the innocent upgrade button does not work as it says and it certainly does not take a minute.
   Suggestions to Wordpress: give us some sort of status bar to tell us how far the upgrading process has gone. Or, don’t try to be clever with these buttons when I would have saved myself time and worry doing it the hard way.