Thank you. I guess that's what happens after reading a few dozen C5 pages over a couple hours. I've upgraded from 5.3.3.1 to 5.4.2.2 in five stages so far, turned off error messages and even changed my php.ini settings to "display_errors: Off" etc. and I am still get strict error messages all over the place. So, this has been a good faith effort that by the time I finally get this p.o.s up to 5.5+ these error messages will start to disappear. Again, thanks for pointing out what I missed.

I hope the upgrades go well for you, if you still have the strict messages when you get upgraded the problem might be an external library being used on the site that conflicts with other C5 things, I've run into that issue before.

It didn't work. The updates folder was not essential I realized; it was just suggesting a place to store the updates. When I finally got up to 5.5.1, C5 simply would not upgrade. So frustrating.

For anyone who's interested:

It says:

"You must first upgrade your site to version 5.4.2.2"

Environment Info says:
# concrete5 Version
5.4.2.2