Richard,
Welcome to the wonderful world of FreeBSD. FreeBSD-5.1 is not "release" code. It is "alpha" quality (thought pretty good quality as Alpha goes). I understand that the website doesn't make this abundantly clear on the homepage. FreeBSD 4.8 is the current production quality code. It will probably be much faster for you as well, since debugging options are turned off by default. You can get from 5.1 to 4.8 without having to reinstall the OS by, well, reinstalling the OS.
By following the instructions in the handbook for "upgrading" you can also "downgrade" to FreeBSD-4.8 by downgrading your source tree in /usr/src, building and installing world. It's actually not quite as bad as it seems in the docs and I've managed upgrades and downgrades with minimum of downtime. Most of the steps can be done while the system is running. The steps that should be done in single user mode (and I recomend this since your not familiar with FreeBSD yet) are pretty quick.
FreeBSD is actually fairly nice once you know what's going on.
The Handbook is http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html
and the chapter you want is http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cutting-edge.html
Substitude "old" for cutting edge and your on your way. The CVS tag you would want is
RELENG_4_8
I would recomend rebuilding anything you built in ports after you upgrade the system, since this downgrade is considerable, but again much of that compile time will be while the system is running.
Your really only looking at the time to do a make install and make installkernel, and rebuilding the database server as your downtime. Much less considerable than reinstalling an entire OS and getting everything installed that you want.
If you need more assistance shoot me a line, off the MySQL list (as it's no longer a MySQL issue) and I'll answer what I can.
-- Michael Conlen
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