I installed 3.4.9 today, just on a lark. Everything seems to have ported over fine, except for one thing: the sidebar now renders all of the widgets in one big space, instead of giving them their own spaces, and does not recognize the CSS inserts I'd added to put custom images above and below each widget. Of course, going back to 3.4.6 fixes all of it.

Just curious...did how widgets get rendered change significantly between 3.4.6 and 3.4.9, or is this a small setting I neglected to tweak?

try this, go to the widget styling page and do a save

No go. Saved both in Style Widgets *and* HTML/CSS Includes. Still all in one big widget box, no top and bottom.

(It also didn't bring over my customized footer content; it reverted it to the default settings. No biggie; just for FYI if it helps.)

since 3.5.0 has been released, I would suggest going to it because of the fixes to the settings issue. Once it is activated, go to the EXPORT/IMPORT screen and hit the 'Delete the option 'bfa_ata4'' button at the bottom.

I can give that a shot. If I download and install it to a separate folder, does it store settings in a different location than the 3.4.6 settings? That is to say, if it fouls up, would I be able to switch right back to 3.4.6 and have everything be ok?

Turns out the answer to that is "yes".

Still have the same issue with the sidebar under 3.5.1. (Also the header text sizes have changed.) I noticed some of the settings for widget text colors and styles didn't make it over, as well. I'm starting to wonder if there is something wonky with the importing of settings? Could I safely set the 3.5.1 version to complete-blow-it-all-out-default and then see if re-customizing it from a from-scratch state would maybe work? I just don't want to lose the customized state in 3.4.6, which is working.