I had been looking at the PHP client setting as my mySQL version,  but discovered that the server version was still 4.0.x,  which was not late enough for WordPress 2.9.  Since I was out of db quota for databases (I have 4 mySQL and 4 MSSQLServer),  my host migrated/copied by WordPress database to a new server and restored it all to a new mySQL 5.0.x database,  and my WordPress 2.9 version went off without a hitch.

So this post will also serve as a test of my Twitter/WP plugins,  to insure that blog posts Twitter updates still work