upgrade to 3.1.2 using ?tegory% breaks permalinks

Hello,

I found a number of posts w/this same issue – permalinks not working after an upgrade but they were much older posts dating back to version 2x etc.

I’ve been using this for years for my permalink structure:

/%category%/%post_id%/%postname%/

I upgraded to 3.1.2 tonight and suddenly all my links took me to the home page and “nothing found” would appear in the browser title. I could not get to any pages or posts. Nothing I tried following the other older posts helped. When I chose a default permalink structure the links worked. So I started messing with my custom permalink structure and found that using %category% caused the links to fail each and every time no matter where I put it in the permalink structure.

My category names *very* are important to me and to my link structure. Version 3.1.2 appears to have broken the option of using it (at least that’s how it seams) and now I have all kinds of pages that people would have links to – articles & blog posts that I sent out that are now going to be broken links. I certainly cannot go back and redirect all of these at this point – there are way to many of them.

I have read that using %category% first causes performance issues and I did try changing it’s location in the permalink structure – but the links would not work no matter where in the structure I put it so even that’s not an option for future use apparently.

Any suggestions for being able to use the category option in the permalink structure?