problems with mysql5

[Rich]

it seems that there are a couple of problems with amarok & mysql5. maybe 
somebody with a knowledge of both could help :)

1. does not work with mysql 5.0.24
spits an error on every sql query :
[CollectionDB] MYSQL QUERY FAILED: Commands out of sync; you can't run 
this command now

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132114

could be mysql problem, could as well be a problem with my system 
(though it works just fine with 5.0.22)

2. some time ago, amarok used varchar for some columns. later, it was 
changed to varbinary. for new databases, all of these instances are 
varbinarys, but upgrading amarok does not automatically change all of 
these fields. that works just fine with mysql4, but for some reason with 
mysql5 mysqld load is VERY high, and as a result, amarok - very slow.

looking at db dumps before/after, i noticed field changes. somehow i 
decided to try changing data for one table only, and i chose statistics.
both url & uniqueid had this field type change, so i changed them both.
from :
`url` varchar(255) character set latin1 collate latin1_bin NOT NULL default
to :
`url` varbinary(255) NOT NULL default ''

the problem is gone.
it seems that at least one other person has managed to reproduce the 
problem & the "fix" :
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132012

so, is this a problem with mysql or amarok ?
even when mysqld load is high, i can execute queries on all tables, 
including statistics, just fine.
and why did it help to change the field type only on a single table, why 
not all of them ? is stats table queried more often ? (probably not, 
because slowdowns were even when simply expanding a collection browser 
entry).

of course, it could also be not because of the field type but because of 
additional charset/collate options, but finding this out already took me 
awfully lot of time ;)
-- 
  Rich