can i upgrade?

I had originally set up a site with categories back in Mar 2006 (03/18/2006 version of cat mod).

I had a lot of issues with it and pretty much abondoned the project until recently. Since I seem to still have the same headaches (lots of error msgs about duplicate entries, not being bale to remove pages from category, etc) i thought i would attemp to upgrade to the latest to see if any of the bgs had been fixed.

IS THIS POSSIBLE.

I can see that there are more modules, more tables and more fields now - so i figured i would need to have the .install run. I deleted the cat entries in the system table and i think that allowed the .install to run when i enabled the new cat module (I deleted the cat mod folder and replaced it with the new one; but left all the cat tables in place so try to preserve my site structure).

MY GUESS is that the .install will not upgrade correctly - for example it CREATEs tables that already exist and therefore doesnt ALTER the old tables with the new fields.

I noticed an error due to missing cat_cont table missing a admin_title field so i manually added it. That got rid of that error but now i get numerous in_array errors from line such as this:

$cont->children_have_distant = !in_array('0', $cont->children_allowed_parents);

in category_inc as well as other places

is it safe to assume that it is not possible to upgrade to a newer cat version (both are 4.7)?

Will i need to delete all the cat tables to begin using the newer code and then, i assume, i will need to re-categorize my entire site?