spontaneous outages

Re: Drupal (on mySQL update) lost ability to authenticate (title corrected)

Since my lunarpages admins have upgraded the mySQL DB installation, my site home page now looks like this: http://mynichecomputing.org/drupal6/ (take a look; it is now an error page, suggesting procedures).

I have now twice tried the Drupal-suggested procedure, SET PASSWORD = PASSWORD('your_existing_password');

Though I give this SQL command in the ONLY place it makes sense '
to do it in phpMyadmin ,
all this does is disable my ability to get into phpMyadmin and has