DaveClapp

I had this problem while updating a theme and might have a different solution. Instead of deleting the .maintenance file, I looked inside it and recognized a unix timedate stamp 1287155241. I used an online unix time conversion tool and it translates to sometime after 3pm this afternoon. It was 10:36am, so I used the same time conversion tool to create a unix time of 10:37am and pasted that into the .maintenace file. 30 seconds later my site was back online.

here is a copy of my .maintenance timestamp for 10/15/2010 10:37am
<?php $upgrading = 1287139020; ?>

and here’s the url to the conversion tool I used
https://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm

I hope this helps!

I had this same problem with WordPress 2.9.2 on a custom theme. The custom theme was missing the wp_head() and wp_footer functions. Once I placed those functions into the theme’s header.php and footer.php the wp-polls work Perfectly.