As stated in the WordPress’s Codex, one of the steps in doing a proper upgrade of WordPress is deactivating all plugins beforehand (and reactivating upon successful upgrade). Since I’m managing a number of WordPress sites, and each WordPress install has a fair bit amount of active plugins, doing this is a considerably arduous task and annoying (especially so since updates/upgrades get released often).
I was googling around for a quick fix for this and found this plugin which works a treat. :)
Now if only that can be added to my shell script which currently automatically grabs the latest.tar.gz and rsyncs all the separate installs to promote further efficiency and laziness..