Advice for updating from previous version

Hi, Mark. I recommend waiting until the dust settles from some of these recent updates to the relevant modules. There are some significant problems, and a substantial rewrite is in the works. Some people have had success with earlier versions, depending on exactly what version you're upgrading from.

I just recently disabled, uninstalled, and removed all of the captcha-related modules I've been using (captcha, recaptcha, form store, form collect, and textimage) and then installed the most recent official releases of captcha and recaptcha. Everything went quite smoothly except for the odd fact that I needed to run update.php to get one of the tables for captcha (despite installing from scratch).

Kudos to the developers working on these modules. Things are shaping up nicely!

except for the odd fact that I needed to run update.php to get one of the tables for captcha (despite installing from scratch).

That's because the old versions did not define its own database table, and the new version does. Technically this is a change in database layout between module version, so Drupal suggests to run update.php. If you check the first update function in captcha.install, you'll see indeed "CREATE TABLE" statements.

Thanks for testing.