My head hurts... but I get it now, I think.

First merge didn't take. Although the site ran fine I could not log in to admin area to examine the user changes. Seemed like a session error, even the default Admin login failed. Restored previous db and am back in.

New plan, use live database, merge in changes to configuration. Mostly this will be ez-pages tables. Much less risky, right?

Will also look at the zc_install page to see how to update database since I am importing 1.3.8 db into 1.3.9 ZC. Thought that was just a .sql action.

Thanks for the advice!