well, you're right, the way I use tabs in these pages is not exactly what it was built for. I use it as a Client-side pagination. Works nice that way also.
So I got confused when I finally found the reasons of non-working upgrade, and I apologise that you lost your time because of me. There were two problems. First of all I made a mistake :in the UI version, you're supposed to apply the tabs method to the unordered list and forget the old #container. Then I built my page putting the shadetabs (used as pager), after and not before the .tabcontent. if you combine these two things you obtain a very amazing and destroy result. Anyway, thinking about this misadventure, I decided to use a script I found in my "go-to-bed-book", the great "learning jquery" of Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer, to build both pagination and table sorting. Thanks a lot for your help, and for your great contribution to jQuery.