Repair Custom Fields question

[sgb]

Hello all,

I recently been asked to take over the administration of a SugarCRM installation.

Details as follows:
Edition - Sugar Open Source
Version - 4.2.1c
OS - Debian 3.1
DB - MySQL 5.0.3

We noticed that one of the custom drop-down fields on the opportunities tab was not saving after a refresh, so I went looking and experimented (briefly) with the 'Repair Custom Fields' option, thinking that maybe the details were in the php but not in the database.

The output of the simulation was as follows:

Scanning Opportunities
Dropping Column country_c from opportunities_cstm for module Opportunities
Dropping Column product_c from opportunities_cstm for module Opportunities
Dropping Column channel_c from opportunities_cstm for module Opportunities
Dropping Column submit_date_c from opportunities_cstm for module Opportunities
Dropping Column weighted_value_c from opportunities_cstm for module Opportunities
5 field(s) missing from opportunities_cstm
Adding Column Country_c to opportunities_cstm
Adding Column Product_c to opportunities_cstm
Adding Column Channel_c to opportunities_cstm
Adding Column Submit_Date_c to opportunities_cstm
Adding Column Weighted_Value_c to opportunities_cstm

I'm not sure what happened to change the first characters to upper case (this application is new to me) but I'd say dropping columns is a bad idea. They clearly have data in them at the moment.

Questions -

What could have caused this?
MySQL field names are case insensitive - is there any way to stop SugarCRM from differentiating field names on case?
Is this the root of my problem? (Channel_c would is the rogue field that kicked all this off).

Thanks for any help

S.

EDIT: I noticed this post from someone who had the same problem under version 4.5 last September.