PHP 5?! Oh please.

Well, after many hours of fiddling with plugins, deactivating them, deleting them, etc. and after chmod-ing my various directories through ssh (thank you, fabulous husband and unix king) to 777 (I really hate that, by the way), and then chmod-ing them back again (phew!), and then resetting the Wordpress theme back to the default Kubrick, I was about to give up and just do a complete re-install of Wordpress 2.8.4. [...]