acceslog and access stay empty

I've tried to fask the forums for help on this issue, assuming it was something I'd done see http://drupal.org/node/172162

I had a drupal 4.6 site, which I immediately to 4.7 and now I've upgraded to 5.3. Somewhere along the line statistics got borked (if they ever worked, I was on 4.6 for only ten minutes so who knows) and no matter what I try, I can't get them to work again.

Dropping and recreating the tables access and accesslog exactly as they should be (and are in my other databases) does not help. Uninstalling and reinstalling statistics does not help. See last post in the linked thread where I describe everything that I've tried to breathe life back into these tables.

I have absolutely no issues with clean drupal installs 5.1 and 5.3, there accesslog fills up nicely right out of the box (or rather, as soon as you enable them).

ps yes statistics are enabled. This has only happened to one of my site which upgraded from 4.6 to 4.7 then to 5.3 - on another site I went from 4.7 to 5.1 and have no problems.