After battling through constant comment spam day after day, I finally gave in and upgraded WebKeyDesign to latest WordPress 2.0 version. Initially I had forestalled this for months due to the bad experience I had with one of my other sites, but I figured the 2.0.2 version looked stable enough and I was down to just one incompatible plugin.
The installation went quite well. Since I did not change any of the current theme setup, there really was not much to fix after the upgrade, except for entries that had highlighted html code boxes, which relied on the incompatible plugin. Instead of using CodeHighLight, I had to come up with a more complicated solution. I ended up keeping some of the CSS that CodeHightLight uses and then translating the actual code snippets with SimpleCode. This plugin just takes regular code and translates it so the browser will display the code symbols. I then had to take the translated snippets and add DIV tags to them and put them back into each posting. Needless to say, this took some time, but it looks almost as good as what I had before.
As for WordPress 2.0, the performance seems to be better than the older 1.5.2 version, and in the time that upgraded the site and fixed my postings, Askismet caught something like 213 comment spams!