[cd34]

2.6 isn't bad as a fresh install. And due to poor documentation in prior versions, PapaGMP ran into the index.php/permalink issue because it was never expected by wordpress that someone would do that.

If you started a blog from scratch, and were relying on templates developed from the community, and you didn't want the performance hit from that awful tag cloud query, 2.6 is about your only choice. If you have an older version, I would upgrade to 2.5.1 and stick there. You still have the awful tag-cloud issue, but, you would give wordpress the time to release 2.6.1 which will probably fix a lot of the 2.x -> 2.6 migration issues.