royalts

I found an old copy of WP 1.21 on my hard drive and indeed, as I remember, it imports all entries correctly.

If you want to have a look at the MT export file I am talking about, it can be found here: https://www.royal-ts.de/wp-admin/import.txt

As I said, I have tried this once before in 1.20 and it worked just fine. I did some more digging and found out that what happens is actually not that WordPress only imports the first entry and its comments. It imports the first entry and adds all other contents of the import file as a comment or multiple comments to the first entry.

Experimenting with this some more, could it be that the MT export format changed since the last time I tried this and the WordPress import script was changed accordingly? If so, is there any way to still import the old format?

that was the problem exactly. Deleted the contents of the form and it worked just fine. There seem to be some other weirdo problems with the import script though. I managed to work around them, but it may be worthwhile to fix them nonetheless: WP seems to think that some of my commentors are authors and treats them as such. Funky =)

Thanks, splitting up the exports via index templates worked just fine. Now, however I have another (probably newbie) problem:
When I feed WordPress the first batch of data from my MT export it asks me to assign an author to the posts. I pick the only author in my WP installation, the admin, and then tell it to go ahead with the import. The import then works just fine, however instead of assigning the imported posts to the admin user account that I told it to use WP creates a new user with the exact same user name and assigns the posts to that user. What am I doing wrong?

I do have phpadmin. How do I do the dbasebackup you are talking about?