1. All the editing I've done to my 240 skin(s) took effect immediately. AFAIK the only thing you need to reload (not uninstall and re-install - reload) a skin for is addition or removal of containers. You might find the option to delete pre-rendered cache on the Tools->misc tab useful. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I sort of learned it's some form of magic that sometimes seems to do cool stuff.

2. I forget the exact detail, but check out the photoblog skin because it does comments in a popup ... assuming the visitor allows popups of course. They simply never popup when I browse, but that's a different issue. The basic idea of setting up your blog to do a popup is there but different.

Ah here it is. In index.main.php you do this:

					$Item->feedback_link( array(
									'type' => 'feedbacks',
									'link_before' => '<div class="action_right">',
									'link_after' => '</div>',
									'link_text_zero' => get_icon( 'nocomment' ),
									'link_text_one' => get_icon( 'comments' ),
									'link_text_more' => get_icon( 'comments' ),
									'link_title' => '#',
									'use_popup' => true,
								) );

And you copy the feedback_popup.main.php file from photoblog skin to your skin. I have no idea how it happens, but that seems to be the source material to play with for popup comments.

3. As with all hacks in all versions, getting the same thing as before depends on (a) the core being compatible and (b) someone taking the time to make it. Thus "full comments in the sidebar" will happen when someone makes it happen. I think you're right in assessing that this has not been done yet.

4. The old magpierss hack is something I personally won't be revisiting as there is a groovy new plugin that handles the same task with a different external application. Lemme see if I can find it ... okay http://waffleson.co.uk/2008/01/playing-with-an-rss-reader is the shiznit, assuming a shiznit is a good thing :)

5. Aggregating blogs is done with a back office setting where any blog can aggregate any mix of any blog ID numbers. Designation as a linkblog is done with a widget on the Blog settings tab - install the linkblog widget and tell it which blog to use in the linkblog and there you go. Gone is the idea of using a setting with a "no blog" option because no widget clearly means no linkblog. You can therefore easily have 5 linkblogs on one blog by installing that widget 5 times.

AFAIK upgrading your golden oldie to 240/241 is the ONLY upgrade path you have available with a high degree of reliability. Trying incremental upgrades is known to have problems even if you use a hack that was developed to help minimze the problems found when stopping at 1.10.3 version. So clearly you want a quality fresh backup BEFORE you upgrade, and I also suggest wiping out tables that are wipable. hitlog comes to mind, and probably your antispam table if you've never emptied it. Don't DROP the tables of course - EMPTY (truncate really, but phpmyadmin has an EMPTY option to execute the truncate command) is what you want to do. That to help speed things up by having less to deal with, and to be honest I doubt it will help much on a very large database. The issues by the way tend to be associated with the process taking too long. Therefore you might want to talk to your host IF your database is huge. Thousands of posts and thousands of comments starts to get a bit large so you decide if your database is huge or not. Talking to your host about an upgrade script to upgrade a very large database might reveal a bit of help from them you weren't expecting yah?

Anyway the upgrader in 240/241 is the best there is at handling upgrading a large installation ... but do have a backup and some time to put into it.

All I had to do is find the code and change the use_popup from false to true and then add the feedback_popup.main.php to my skin.

It worked, but unfortunately I am running into difficulty trying to edit the layout. Argh... all of the text is extremely small.

I know it has to do with the fact that the photoblog is referencing a different div class from the style blog and that same class is not there in my blog. I am hoping there is a quick fix to at least get the text size to a normal size?

Any Ideas ?

Change the div class? Like, make the popup file use the same div classes as your skin - and of course point to the style sheet your skin uses.

Haven't looked at it though. No interest in popups here is why. But yeah if it's using different div classes and you're getting a different effect I'm thinking cause and effect is pretty much happening.