Parallels Plesk - broken!

Just got another Virtual Private Server (VPS) from 1and1. Comes with Plesk 10. Completed a re-image this morning and got it up and running.

Done some updates on CentOS, PHP and MySQL. Tried to apply the updates to Plesk 10.3 and; server broken.

So, another reimage. This time though, I am documenting the steps to find out what breaks it. Probably Plesk...

Update
The first attempt at upgrading Plesk failed resulting in total inability to upgrade/update. This occurred for the following reasons:

• Mulitple additional component was selected for install onto version 10.1.1. These were applied successfully with no apparent errors.
• The update to 10.2.1 was selected to update the Panel software. This failed.

The additional components installed were the latest versions designed for the latest version of Plesk. The later update to the panel was 'expecting' older versions of the components, so these were skipped/corrupted causing dependencies to be broken.

It is fortunate that I was not performing this method of update to an existing Panel with live websites. That would have been disastrous (and embarrassing).