What the upgrade involved

Upgrades of an existing installation were never affected. Upgrades run the upgrade scripts, and those were clean, and existing servers already have their databases. Only fresh installs hit this. If an unattended 6.2.19 install is still sitting there doing nothing, it is waiting on a message box.

What was wrong

• The SQL script runner splits a script into commands on blank lines. SQL Server Compact, the embedded database a fresh install uses, executes one statement per command and refuses a batch. A recent change added settings to the create scripts with a single newline between inserts, so three statements arrived as one command. Full SQL Server accepts that batch, so the development database and the 1,490-test regression suite saw nothing wrong. The same adjacency was in the MySQL and PostgreSQL create scripts. All three are fixed, and a mechanical sweep of all 199 SQL scripts confirms no multi-statement command remains in any create script or any SQL CE script. Five upgrade scripts from the 5.x era keep their batches for the full-server backends that accept them.
• The error raised a plain message box, and /VERYSILENT /SUPPRESSMSGBOXES suppresses only the suppressible kind. A silent install did not report the failure, it waited on a dialog with nobody at the keyboard. In CI that was ninety minutes until a person cancelled it. All 28 dialogs in the installer now take their default button under /SUPPRESSMSGBOXES, and the installer proceeds to an exit code a deployment script can read. Interactive installs see exactly the dialogs they always saw.

Also in this release

IMAP THREAD (RFC 5256), both algorithms, THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT and THREAD=REFERENCES, with real References-chain threading. It is bounded by the same per-command ceilings as SEARCH and SORT. An adversarial review found and fixed a stack overflow reachable through a deep reply chain, an uninterruptible header pass and a malformed-Date sort inversion.

The installer smoke test now bounds the silent-install step at ten minutes, keeps the installer's own log, and on a database failure re-runs the setup tool and prints its stderr.

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