So last night I finally bit the bullet and plunked $29.99 to upgrade my Mac Pro and my MacBook Pro to OSX Lion.
It was worth it, and I don't know why I waited so long - OK I do. Because it wasn't THAT big a deal, and I'm a cheapskate.
But in the process I had some issues with some of my sites in my local development environment. And while I can't explain exactly why I had the issues, the article above helped me get everything set back up properly by setting up the server on phpMyAdmin afresh. Seems like the OS upgrade messed up the server setting somewhere along the line, causing my localhost to not properly be connected to the mysql databases.
It's pretty painless getting it set back up though, even to a back-end novice like myself (who, incidentally, had to get help from a friend just to get it set up in the first place!).