Upgraded to 3.03, cannot publish new posts

I have a blog I’m working on that has 5800+ POSTS.

Upgraded to wordpress 3.03, and now for some reason I am unable to publish new posts. Every time I try to Add a New post, I get a ‘Submit for Review’ button instead of a Publish button. When I hit that, it pretends to create a post, but doesn’t. Just creates a title entry. When I then try and edit that post, it says, “You attempted to edit an item that doesn’t exist. Perhaps it was deleted?”

This blog has NO plugins installed and no custom changes made to code.

I’ve tried everything I’ve read on these forums from reseting the role capibilities of the admin user, to deactivating plugins, checking abotu disk space issues, etc.

I was able to recreate the problem in a new blog.

I copied my wordpress folder to a temporary location, installed a new copy of the same files to the same database with a different prefix. Logged in and checked to see if the admin user could write/publish new posts. it can. Then I exported all my posts from the original site using the Wp export tool. Imported all 5800+ posts into the new site, and immediately after importing those posts, the problem re-occurs.

I manually deleted all posts from the database by emptying the entire wp_posts table, but the Publish button never returns.

Any insight?