butterfly1 –
Did you do the manual upgrade after you disabled all of the plugins? If you did and it didn’t work, my only suggestion would be to roll back to a previous version of WordPress.
Here’s where you can download 2.7.1.
Follow the manual upgrade and your site will at least be functional.
Hopefully they’ll come out with a fix for all of the 2.8 issues soon, or maybe the next release won’t have any problems.
Let me know how it goes.