Upgrading to 4.0.3 CMS from 4.0.2 Forum + Joomla

[محروم.كوم]

Hi.

our site recently bought a suite license and I'll be taking the site to 4.0.3 suite in a little bit (few days? depends on how long it takes to find out the answer to the following question ).

Currently we have Joomla as the CMS for the homepage (domain root) and the forums in the /forums folder.

As I understand it, the default/easiest way for 100% functionality is to have the suite+forums in the same folder, right?

So my initial plan moving the vbulletin install to the root folder (this solves two purposes, one is the ease of install and the second is that for years my users have been bypassing the homepage and manually going to mysite.com/forums, and this change will force them to get reintroduced to the new homepage ).


in order to accomplish this, what's the recommended way?

switch locations then upgrade to 4.0.3 and install the CMS? or upgrade then switch locations? or does it not matter?

Also, I have a some links from 3rd party sites like digg and others, and a fair amount of traffic coming in from Search Engines- is there an easy way to keep the links intact?

ex:
current link to a thread is:
http://www.mysite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61211

after the move the actual thread should be at
http://www.mysite.com/showthread.php?t=61211

I'm guessing from looking around some type of code in the .htaccess file will accomplish this, right?

I'm not really to familiar with the .htaccess file, so I wanted to know- would the file in the donnotupload folder do this for me? or would I need to use a different one/change it to do this?

The forum links would also have to change:
http://www.mysite.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=32
will hopefully redirect to:
http://www.mysite.com/forumdisplay.php?f=32

Thanks, for looking at this

PS- safe to assume there's no easy way to port my CMS content from joomla to Vb CMS, right? not that any of my joomla content is essential, it just would've been cool to port over for preservation of history, lol. __DEFINE_LIKE_SHARE__