sorry, what message do you see after clicking on the upgrade button??

look in the db, with phpmyadmin or other similar tool, in the wp_sfoptions table (your prefix may be other than wp_) for the option name of sfbuild and sfversion… what are they?

but really need to know what happens when you hit upgrade??? not clear from your post…  but sounds like something (ie super cache or w3 total cache or other) interferring with the ajax responses of the install… 

could you try it with the browser console open and see what the ajax responses are?

thank you, your questions helped me find the problem. 

When I rsynced the files the permissions were -rw-rw-r– which is the default on my workspace but not what the destination server likes.  And the server has some feature that balks on serving files that aren’t 644. In this case a js file being called was redirecting to an error page and causing a js failure … which was evident when looking at the network inspector in firefox.

Once I fixed the file permssions, the upgrade proceded as usual.

I doubt it matters but js file in question was

wp-content/plugins/simple-press/sp-startup/install/resources/jscript/sp-install.js

Thanks for the late night response! I will have sweet dreams now.

p.s. before the fix, when I hit the (regular) upgrade, I got a blank screen below the page header, instead of the usual progress bar. When I hit network upgrade I got something like site 1 was upgraded, but with no progress bar.

appreciate the update… wonder if the permission issue was logged in the php error log?  but glad all is well…  Happy New Year!