Hi Ken,
That "catch me" putting MySQL 5.1.33 on under the cover of darkness could be problem. True. In my dealings with them they specifically said that to put 5.1.33 on I'd need to move to dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting. Maybe I just limit myself to 2.2.3, installations, which are all working just fine with the automated 5.0 install button they stick in there and wait till someone important calls and "urges" them to upgrade to 2.3.2. Am I missing much by not having the latest, greatest stable 2.3.2 version? Thanks for these tips. Actually, though I know it ain't very politically correct to say this, after ENORMOUS problems for a while there and at least 20 phone calls to their technical people who "were aware of the load-balance issues" I upgraded to Ultimate Shared Hosting for only a couple bucks more per month and got a free SSL certificate to impress people at cocktail parties with and am now, after lots of little tweaks to the php5.ini file, seeing very good performance. End of political announcement.