Actually, preupgrade ran fine it was after the reboot that the problems started. First, I have no idea what happened to my video but anaconda must have gotten something wrong because all I saw was green vertical lines spaced all the way across the screen (Vizio 32" LCD), however, I remembered from two other machines that it basically does it's thing and reboots when it's done so that's what I let it do.
Apparently there are some Gnome and KDE i386 packages that are no longer needed on X86_64 systems because my first 'yum update' had failed dependency checks because of this. I expected to have issues with any 3rd party repo stuff but not Fedora installed packages. Should anaconda or yum (--obsoletes maybe?) be smart enough to handle this situation?
Another quirk, switchdesk no longer appears to work. This was my MythTV system which is barely capable of running HD so I have been using fluxbox but after the upgrade gnome loaded and even after explicitly running 'switchdesk fluxbox" which reports success, gnome still loads.
Lastly, switchdesk does not seem to support LXDE. Am I wrong in assuming that switchdesk should support all the official Fedora DE's? I like using switchdesk because it seems there 1000 ways to make your DE run and I want to do in the "best practice" way.
Thanks, Richard