[SOLVED] Best Upgrade Procedure -- WP 2.7.1 to WP 3.1, Atahualpa 3.3.3 to 3.6.x???

My site (www.fromtheranks.com) has been up for some time but I've been terribly remiss (due to time constraints -- working and moving, twice) in doing necessary upgrades. I also recently had to move everything over to a new host, as my old one went belly up.

As you can see in the Title I'm still on WP2.7.1. and Atahualpa 3.3.3.

Trying to sort through and sort out the various posts here and on the WP site has left me with a very unclear picture on the best route through the upgrade process (other than be sure to back up my database and wp_content folder; of course).

My questions are (my initial questions are):

1. Should I upgrade WP to 3.1 first, then upgrade Atahualpa? Or vice versa?

• If I upgrade WP first, will Atahualpa 3.3.3 run on it?

• If I upgrade Atahualpa first, will 3.6.x run on 2.7.1?

2. When upgrading Atahualpa, what I've read suggests creating a separate theme folder, which makes sense. Except. Does this mean that I have to manually set up Atahualpa 3.6.x from scratch? There are a lot of settings and CSS code in my current version that would be rather time consuming to port over manually. If I have to I have to but I'm curious if the upgrade process actually reads the prior version and ports it over automatically.

3. Any known issues in upgrading directly through so many versions?

4. Finally, for now, I ran across a post somewhere that recommended uninstalling all of the widgets and plugins before upgrading WP. Is this correct?

Don