[peterska2]

I'll stand up and say that I know exactly where you are coming from. From 3.0.2 to 3.0.7 my site was that heavily modified it would take me two or three days to prepare the files for an upgrade. (Yes, I could have used a comparision programme but I've always been a do it by hand type person).

3.0.8 came out, and with it came a load of offline problems (Jelsoft always have bad timing with their releases for me) so it was a quick upgrade, install the one or two (or maybe 50) essentials, and leave it be. The same happened with 3.0.9 at which point the site upgrades got stuck until 3.5.0 (Gold I think).

With 3.5.0 I actually managed to get it down to about 100 modifications installed, which was quite manageable, and never really had any major problems.

Then my host had a major server problem and all my files and over half my database was erased. Time to find a new host quick, work on repairing this horrendously corrupt database in conjunction with a backup I had taken a few weeks earlier, and then start adding the modifications again.

Well, at this point, as a number of the modifications I was running were custom ones that I had just wrote on the fly and never documented, a good amount were lost. So again I just installed the essentials and got it down to about 50.

Then with 3.6 I've been able to get rid of some of the modifications I had that have been made obsolete with the features in 3.6 and am now running quite happily at about 25 modifications installed.

I think really that the major version upgrades teamed with the big server disaster of 2006 made me re-evaluate what we actually needed on the site and just get rid of any stuff that we didn't need.

Mind you, I'm still constantly tweaking something. If anyone ever wants me for anything then they know that the best place to look first is deep inside the style manager burried in a load of conditionals (seriously, most people cry when they see some of my conditionals as they are that complex).