After a few hours of testing I've let the miners on my pool know that it's ok to upgrade.
I think you should remove the link to this block explorer from your OP:
http://gld.cryptocoinexplorer.com/ this explorer did not show my transaction for over an hour.
the other block explorer took about 20 minutes before the transaction showed up.
The block explorers may in fact be correct. The reason for the update to the client is to fix a bug that was resulted in a difficulty higher than it should have been. The transaction that you were talking about took 3 hours to get the 10 confirms required on Cryptsy. (6 was two hours, but should be 12 minutes). The changes in the code don't affect the operation of the client until block 248,000.