when upgrading from old versions of WP the category names vanish and are not editable from the admin page, as reported before.
I think I found a bug in upgrade.php, in function upgrade_230().
In the first half of that function, the variables $name and $slug are not set, then those empty vars are used (read) to fill in a new record into the terms table. The slots name and slug are then empty.
Just my interpretation of the code. Can someone of the developers confirm this and fis it please?
(In the second half of that function upgrade_230() the same code is repeated for the link categories, there the vars are set correctly.)