Upgraded from PrestaShop™ 1.4.6.2 to 1.5.3 and everything broke

[intrafusion]

I'm in windows 2008 r2 running plesk.

 

Auto update wouldnt work for me.

 

1) I backed my DB and made a backup of my website.

2) Made fresh folder and copied extracted zip into it.

3) Copied all my images and theme over.

4) ran install

 

Various things stopped working and I was able to fix them

1) All my thumbnails were blank (fixed) - rebuilt thumbnails

2) Home/Frontpage products missing (fixed) - changed module to show 0 featured items to 12

 

I couldnt get the following able to work so I had to restore back to my old site.

 

 

On my website I ship through USPS. Looking at my modules on 1.4 install, I believe I use the following:

Shipping Estimation v1.1 by PrestaShop

U.S.P.S. Rate Calulator v1.2.1 by PrestaShop

 

On my upgrade. everything auto calculates as free shipping and I cant get it to bring up a USPS price for anything.

 

My facebook like box dissapeared, but that was no big deal.

 

All of my items that never had a select a color option, now had a select a color option (found some stuff in the forum about commenting out a few lines from product.tpl).

 

Also when I tried to use the autoupdate module, I cant turn safe_mode off, even those my control panel says it is off. I also get a json parse error when I try to upgrade.

 

any guidance for upgrading would be appreciated.