My girlfriend solved this for me
around line 4 in wp-blog-header.php there is a ?> with some bad spacing before the next <?
fixing this makes everything happy.
My 1.2 category exclusion rule seems broken in 1.5. Looking at the wiki it appears the category_ID tag has been “deprecated”.
Am i totally screwed to make a category exclusion to the frontpage? For reference I’m working on this site where the “staff” tab is a page of things posted to a specific category that does not appear on the main page… that is till my otherwise painless upgrade.