Ok, I have successfully migrated from 1.4.1.6 to 1.4.2 (svn trunk 8754). I have gone through the metadata items and removed all that I don't want to have used. Now when I import a new image even if it has title info it is not used in the new image. Instead the filename is placed there which is the expected behavior.
However, because of the old way of using the metadata as the title I have many photos with the camera manufacturer string as the title in my db. I do have old backups made through the admin db backup/restore util as well as copies of the actual db and sql files to update from.
Looking at the new image table there are about 30 new columns added.
QUESTION: Can I use the old backups from the admin tool even though the columns have changed so drastically or should I just use sql files to manually update the images table.

Thanks for any info.

If you mean the Zenphoto backups, the answer is "maybe". (Wish I could be more exact.) When you run the restore it will empty out your whole database and add back the data it has. If there are field name changes, data from those fields will be lost.

Perhaps a more direct solution would be to use the site MySQL tools to update any record with the camera manufacturer's string and set that field to empty. Then run a metadata refresh.

loool actually that is about what I would say after going through all this. The problem was I had multiple albums affected over a number of backups.

After the upgrade to the RC version I rolled back to a spot that had no problems at all and did a restore from the admin backup util. No problem except having to go back and reset the metadata checkmarks except the time, long and lat and a few others to "do not process..." so I won't have the problem again.
Then some incremental moves to backups on my local machine to find the ones that had the proper data for the images on a per album basis.
Export those from phpMyAdmin as replace data and import back into my remote server.

Thanks for that new metadata option, it is most helpful.
all good, now to get my theme (unsupported hacked up i-feel-dirty) working with 1.4.2 and suggest a few minor changes to a function in zenpage templates and I will be back in the saddle.

okay, not exactly as easy as I first thought but I think I have it now.
The column that is causing the issue is the EXIFDescription that is helpfully placed as the title if it exists stomping whatever is the title. This seems to be placed by windows in both the 'Image Description' (0x0i0e) and 'XP Title' (0x9c9b) tags as I read the exif data.
Anyhow, making the appropriate changes with the allowed meta tags from options->image (I'm guessing its the Image Caption that gets put it the EXIFDescription) and setting the EXIFDescription to NULL has hopefully solved this once and for all.
Thanks for the pointers.