fwiw, the downtime is not related to the SMF version, it's a result of a problem that occurred on the old server, which is why we had to move. A hardware failure froze the old machine and the drives had to be put in a temporary box so I could do the transfer. The crash corrupted several small parts of the database which may be causing the errors. SMF sensed the error and tried to repair it. The problem is the taperssection.com database is over 2Gigs so a full repair can take upto and over 24 hours. When a repair is executed, the database is locked, and all future requests are put into a queue. When the queue is full, the database refuses any more connections, thus "unable to connect to database" errors.
It's very frustrating from my standpoint, but I am working on it, and doing as much work as possible late night as not to interrupt the site during peak hours. I am not a db admin by trade, but am working with a few friends who are and hoping we can get this smoothed out easily. The database is just so gosh dang big
Thanks for understanding and for your patience!
Bri