As you've maybe noticed by now, this is not going well; I fix one thing, another goes broken, and after 7 full days I'm throwing my hands up in the air and asking your help.

help.

It's broke, boss. very broken and not just rough hewn into small pieces but it is a tangled maze of a mash of a brokeness that's got me at my Apache/PHP/MySQL wits end trying to just get it together enough that I can move on and blog something.

Any skilled webmeisters out there with some time to kill chewing on some tricky bits of arcane syntax lore? These are all non-biz sites, hobby stuff and labours of love, but I could sure use a few more eyeballs looking at some of these things. Unfortunately it's all beyond the skills of those who I know well enough to ask directly, and in the meantime, it's not just TeledyN that's broke, but the whole fleet of sites.

• mod_rewrite: Why doesn't this re-write rule turn the old /mt/archives/002139.html URI into /node/2139?
  

  RewriteRule ^mt/archives/0+([1-9][0-9]*).html http://blog.teledyn.com/node/$1 [R]

  ... it did, two days ago, I'm certain, but I had to add some other rules to fix the bizarre Drupal title-link misfires, and even if I undo that, we still get 404's on all those links, or sometimes 304's, but never just a simple re-write the way it should. I'm bleary-eyed looking at this one, and it's only one of about a dozen legacy-data rewrite rules that just doesn't do it's stuff.

• Some of the converted blogs now have story titles that have preserved the MT-style /archives/NNNN.html URI ... but I can't find any such data in the Drupal tables! Where is that title link information and why did it only get tangled in there for some of the converted blogs?
• why do half the clicks on links on these sites cause the page to return in Firefox unchanged? It's amazingly frustrating for visitors and not much fun for your editor and author either. I know something times out somewhere, but it's 50% of the time and PHP shouldn't be that slow ... or is it just me? Do the site menus work for anyone?
• Superb puts MySQL across the lab from the websites, but PHP db_pconnect or db_connect, seems to make no difference, I get way out beyond max connections far more often than ever before; is there anyway to have these 3rd-level domains share a named pool of connections? (all the sites are mapped to the same IP, no virtual hosts, index.php detects the host and branches to the other sites)

That's only the starter list of show-stoppers, but knocking just one of them off that list would sure feel nice. Any web masters want to take a crack at them? Conceptually this new Drupal way of doing personal information centre websites has some amazing potentials, but sadly, if it don't go, it just don't go.