Help with Confluence 4.3 -> 5.5 upgrade: plugin initialization failure?

[M]

I'm trying to do a manual upgrade of our MySQL-backed Confluence 4.3.5 instance to version 5.5.4. Per the instructions, I edit confluence-init.properties to set confluence.home to our existing Confluence home dir, then I start Confluence. I get this error in the logs:

ERROR [main] [internal.util.concurrent.RunnableTimedExecution] execute Closing runnable for context NonValidatingOsgiBundleXmlApplicationContext(bundle=com.atlassian.upm.atlassian-universal-plugin-manager-plugin, config=osgibundle:/META-INF/spring/*.xml) did not finish in 10000ms; consider taking a snapshot and then shutdown the VM in case the thread still hangs

I found this old defect that explains a similar issue: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-21986. (As an aside, why does that have resolution "fixed"? The tenor of the advice is merely "try this, good luck, and Godspeed".)

Are the steps described in that defect still a potential fix? It is quite a hack. Is there anything else to try? I've been working on this for days and at this point, I'd even be satisfied with disabling plugins entirely! Thanks.

[Steven F Behnke]

That ticket is marked "fixed" because it was reporting the conidition for upgrades to 3.5.x (which appears to be fixed by repairing the bandana table)

The issue for 4.x is still open here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-23301

[z]

I'm not saying that this is the answer but check the transaction isolation level of the database. It should be read committed. If its not you can set this with the db property:

transaction-isolation = READ-COMMITED

or with SQL

SET GLOBAL TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ COMMITTED