by Gary Lebowitz.
Many thanks. I am going to go real real slow with this. Apparently there is a way of upgrading both PHP and MySQL using the link I included in my last message, and I am now in the Plesk forum interacting with people who have done this. I just have to weigh the pros and cons of moving to 2.7, given that my installation works 100% perfectly. And, yes, I will make sure to backup everything that works before I start fiddling. Nothing worse than "fixing" what ain't broke....