Would using the No Blog Clients plug-in cause problems if you use Feedburner with your own domain?
In General I think the best advice is to rarely upgrade WordPress. Have an automated backup system that backs up your WordPress directory, images (probably separately), and database. A cron job shell script using mysqldump and tar works well. Have the backup run daily or weekly, depending on how active your blog is. But don’t upgrade WordPress.
When your site is hacked (if it ever is … it’s less common than you’d expect from reading the hysterical blog and forum posts on the internet), you recreate the database from the MySQL dump and then do a clean install of WordPress with the latest version (*this* is the upgrade) and copy your various settings and images in. WordPress will update the database schema if necessary. And you’re done. Not much harder than doing a WordPress upgrade, but you only have to do it every two or three years, if ever.
