With the filp of a couple of switches this morning the migration to Drupal 4.3 is complete. No new features yet but the transition is smooth. Here's what I did.

• Create a copy of the database with the name test_ appended to the start
• Unpack the 4.3 distrubution and merge my existing customized files into the distribution
• Change the config to use the test_ database
• Run the updater script on the test site
• After all is well move the test site into the production path
• Change the config to recognize the real database
• Run the updater on the live database

It possibly would have been better to move the updated test_ database into production but this process worked.