I followed Dr Byte's rebuild advice to the letter, that is I installed a fresh ZC demo on a separate directory and created a separate database, I used 1.5.5a and included the demo products, then I decided to play with my old 1.5.3 database and I uploaded it using PHPMyAdmin, first tried just inserting the SQL from the MySQL dump, and what I got was an error in the table layout_boxes, so I tried to fix by doing a ZC_INSTALL the system recognized the steps and successfully upgraded the database but then my layout was completely garbled, that is none of the products showed up anywhere and the left and right columns ended up been like a solid orange, so no sideboxes, nothing, at this point I didn't even start moving my customized files, to be on the safe side, I have a local backup on my Mac and I'm using Diff on Mac OS X Lion, to compare all files one by one. So my question is, is there a better way to upload the database backup without errors? to restore the backup and have a functional new demo version with all the products?

Am I missing something? There's been a while since my last upgrade, and frankly wasn't doing much in ZC lately ...