Error installing 1.0.8.1

[heatherbell]

it did, however, give me another bat to beat my hosting company with

Best of luck with that!

[ecartz]

Is this down to limitations of MySQL versions that don't allow for all the unicode charsets etc. ?

Not really. Until version 5.7, MySQL had a limit of 767 bytes for an InnoDB index by default. But with true UTF-8, it has to allocate four bytes per character. So 255 characters takes 1020 bytes. So in version 5.7, they increased the limit to 3072 or 768 4-byte characters.

[ecartz]

Now I'm in, half of admin doesn't show. Maybe because of the amendments I made or something being worked on.

I have 1.0.8.1 installed without noticeable issue. Changing the column widths should not cause things to break. It is possible that MySQL 5.0 is having another problem with utf8mb4. Or if the PHP version is old, there might be some other issue.

[Nigel]

I'm now relaxing, drinking a bottle of Tin Pot Hut Sauvignon Blanc 2019 !

I have an ongoing discussion support ticket with a higher level member of staff at my hosts regarding the versions available of all the important facets of a web site and shop etc.
PHP
PhPMyAdmin
MySQL
To name just three !

Pretty sure the issue with 1.0.8.1 is the version of MySQL and the 4 bytes per char issue.