OK, so I was able to fix this by downgrading to 2.8.6 from http://ww.wp.xz.cn/download/release-archive/ then going back into my admin and trying the upgrade to 2.9 again.
I am getting this error as well. Doing a complete manual re-install did not help, nor did disabling all plugins by renaming the plugin folder.
Still having this problem. Any ideas?
