Well, I finally got around to upgrading to 1.5. Despite my misgivings I used cPanel to upgrade. Everything kind of worked. The site works with the default themes but my initial efforts to transform my old template to a new theme was a total bust(i.e. blank screen). So for the time being I am going to use the default 1.5 theme until I can get around to figuring out what I want to do with the old template/css.