Answering your first question about:

And then every alter statement below that tried to add a constraint also gave back an error cannot create table \dbname\#sql – 2500_b.frm….can I just safely ignore this?...i have rolled everything back to how it was with 2.2, but would love to complete the upgrade process….

You must not ignore errors, because all functionalities could not be correct.

Un saludo

Manuel Fernández Panzuela
www.mfernandez.es