Just a quick warning for other newbies like myself who upgrade from WP 2.2.x to 2.3.1: I had a problem with the upgrade because I deleted the wp-content/cache folder, as instructed in step 7 of the detailed upgrade procedure. After step 9 I could not get access to the admin pages anymore.
In my panic that nothing worked anymore and that I had screwed up my site, I forgot to write down the exact error message. It mentioned something about not having access to the cache so after a while I relaxed and simply recreated the wp-content/cache folder. This fixed my problem and I could log in and complete the upgrade.
I think the upgrade instructions should be changed and tell people to delete all files in wp-content/cache instead of deleting the folder itself but I may be wrong in this.