There are some situations known which can cause what looks like totally illogical problems after an upgrade:
If extensions override classes where functions have changed. Solution; try to disable extensions and enable them one by one again till it fails.
If a PHP-cache somehow fails to re-cache scripts, in particular if a change happend to a parent class overridden by a childclass which was not updated. Solution; remove ALL cached PHP files (for PHP-Accelerator, remove "/tmp/phpa_*") and restart Apache.