Why is it that the automatic WordPress upgrade fails?

After finally getting my blog back again after it was hacked a long time back I had it working on WordPress 3.01 a few weeks ago. Yea, a small victory.

Then WordPress 3.02 came out and I went to do the “automatic upgrade”, which just sat there and did nothing, gave me no error messages to let me know it was failing, did nothing. I finally gave up, logged out, searched a few forums and finally came upon the answer that “if it fails, don’t worry, you can just upload the files manually.”

Great.

So we fixed a blog my wife has, e-scentiallyyours.com, which was also hacked, plus two new ones she has created and started, ruthieguten.com and findcityexperts.com. Guess what, all three of those have the very same problem as mine, no automatic upgrade! Then WordPress 3.03 quickly followed 3.02 and we now had four WordPress blogs to update manually. What joy. A Saturday afternoon gone to deleting and uploading gazillions of files on four blogs.

At least it’s all done now and Ruthie now has her very own install of Transmit (Mac) for FTP and a lesson on how to upgrade.

Now we sit and wait for 3.04, oy.

Anybody have any advice on what to check in WordPress for what is causing it to fail? The sites are hosted on 1and1.com and the install is standard except for 2-3 plug-ins being used.