@Mydatery - thank you for this attempt - some people here apparently think this is a joke but I appreciate the effort. Maybe Boonex can take some of your work and make a supported script.

@Zarcon - thank you for the information and being helpful even though we have respectfully disagreed on recent posts.

@CodeSatory - I like your approach better - I think that is how wordpress works - a script that just updates the database, and then you overwrite all the files. I've tried this with even see more simple things like the profile fields table though and still managed to screw things up. After verifying that there were no database changes, I restored the profile fields table, and suddenly the join form stopped working - I have no idea why.