I try to strike a careful balance between staying on the bleeding edge of technology and waiting for new feature sets to be implemented, tested and improved before applying them here.  I was installing DotNetNuke 5.4.2 on a client's dedicated server last week and had a thought:  Does WebDBApps need to be upgraded to the current version of DotNetNuke?

Survey Says:  Yes!  We were running version 5.1.4. 

Our hosting provider allowed us to move to an IIS7 server so that we could offer clients the ability to leverage the features that play especially well such as ASP.NET 4.0 and MVC2.  So, since I was in upgrade mode, I downloaded all the DNN upgrades up to 5.4.2.  My first attempt failed miserably, and here's some advice to those of you looking to follow the same process:

Always backup your SQL Server database and website files!!!  Never upgrade DNN until this is accomplished. Ensure that read and write permissions are granted to your entire wwwroot directory.  This really tripped me...