So I finally got around to an install of RH9. There was a glitch at the end of the first disk and the install died. When I rebooted, I had enough of an install complete that it booted and most services started. I had half a mind to see what would happen if I launched KDE.
Fortunately it was the half that doesn't stay focused on one thing for long, and I rebooted to the installation.
The install started again, but once I made all the basic selections (keyboard, mouse, time zone, etc) and the package selection (um, just upgrade whatever you recognize and leave the rest alone) I was able to upgrade the only redhat installation left on my hard disk, the one that just failed.
And it worked. The install skipped to where it died, installed the rest of the RPMS and everything came back fine.
Except Apache. Sometime between 7.2 and 9 RedHat updated the world's most popular web server from 1.3.27 to 2.0.40 and that played hell with the mod_perl application I am working on here. I got Apache upgraded and running and then it turns out my handler needs upgrading too.
For most users this shouldn't present as much of and issue as I think relatively few people write thier own mod_perl handlers. And those that do are probably more aware of these kinds of changes than I was.