My woes with WordPress 2.8

UPDATE: It looks as if the solution is “wait until updated plugins come out.” Since one or two of them (like Twitter Tools) are explicitly no longer being updated I may just degrade to 2.7.

If you follow my twitter feed then you know that I have had trouble with the Dashboard after upgrading Targuman to WordPress 2.8. When I sent out a general plea on twitter whether or not it was possible to downgrade to 2.7 I was very pleasantly surprised when @wpanswers replied “@Targuman you can downgrade, yes, but why would you want to?” I am glad you asked! And indeed, s/he offered to help further if I provided screenshots, etc. so here it is!

First a description of the problem. After upgrading I noticed that all of the nice functionality of the Dashboard was gone. I saw far less information, the menus on the left would no longer expand (but I could still click on them to go to the page), and I could not move items around. This last element means that I cannot modify widgets at all. So, first, the Dashboard as it appears without the troublesome plugins activated:

With them activated:

The resulting mess in the widgets section:

So I did some trial and error, but not all. WordPress has its own list of what plugins work and which do not here. The “Share This” plugin is on the “don’t” list, as well it should be, since it causes you to not even see the plugins page. Oops. But the following are plugins that I found caused me to lose functionality.

1. Akismet – this, I am told should NOT cause any trouble, but it alone results in the behavior noted.
2. All in One SEO Pack – even though the WP lists this as OK.
3. Twitter Tools
4. WP-Footnotes

That is not many, but I tend not to use too many. The others that I have active that did not seem to cause problems (although it could be a combination effect) are:

1. Audio Player
2. Favicon Manager
3. Google Analyticator
4. Google XML Sitemaps
5. Scripturizer
6. Smart YouTube
7. Sub Pages widget

So I am grateful for any help that others can offer. The problems are all on the management side, so far as I can tell. The site looks the same to observers, I just have extra steps to go through to create a new post or cannot adjust the widgets, that sort of thing.