Upgraded to iPhoto '11 and all photos gone!

Upgraded to iPhoto '11 this evening from iPhoto '09 and all my photos were showing up as blanks. All my events were there and the photo outlines with the correct meta data were all there. But the photos themselves were all blank with a triangle with exclamation point in them.
The Photo Library still showed 44GB in size so I knew it was all there somewhere but nothing was rendering. Tried holding down option/command and rebuilding but that didn't help.
I finally opened up Terminal and went into the photo library and found something that was definitely not right. First the Originals directory now seemed to be a symlink to a new Masters directory and that directory was empty! I also saw a bunch of new "Old ..." directories in there for example "Old Masters". And guess what, inside the Old Masters directory were all my photos!
So I moved all those directories inside Old Masters into Masters and started iPhoto again. All my photos are still blank but if I actually double click on a picture to look at it, it shows up this time instead of the triangle with ! point in it.
I've now restarted iPhoto with option/command and am waiting for the thumbnails to rebuild. It's now taking much longer to rebuild (compared to the first time I tried the trick) and it still has not finished the rebuild process. I'm hoping once this is complete that I'll be back in business.
Looks like Apple was doing some cleaning as part of the upgrade and for some reason, it did not finish it properly. We'll see if I'm back after this rebuild.

Note, here's the sequence of events in my case:
1. Bought new iMac from Apple store
2. Copied iphoto library onto external HFS+ sata disk (~44GB in size) from my old mac's internal disk
3. Copied iphoto library from external HFS+ sata disk onto iMac internal disk
4. Ran iPhoto on iMac and it did some upgrading, etc and then came up just fine
5. Read up on the features for iPhoto '11 on Apple's website and discovered I didn't have some of the new features
6. Discovered in About iPhoto menu that I was actually running iPhoto '09 which was the default installed on my brand new iMac
7. Found that iPhoto '11 was on a DVD that came with my iMac but not pre-installed
8. Used the DVD to upgrade to iLife '11 (iPhoto '11)
9. Launched iPhoto but it did not launch saying I must run an upgrade first using Software Update
10. Launched Software Update and it found iPhoto v9.1.
11. Upgraded to it.
12. Re-launched iPhoto.
13. Started upgrading my photo library
14. Took a long time but finally finished
15. Library came up but with blank thumbnails and blank pictures with a ! triangle in them if you open the photo; but all meta data is correct
16. Ran Get Info on iPhoto Library and saw that it was still the right size (~44GB)
17. Used Terminal to go into the iPhoto Library and saw there was an Old Masters directory which contained all my photos still (hopefully)
At this point tried reading all sorts of forum posts and blogs and found nothing that worked. All pointed to upgrading to 9.0.1 and unfortunately I'm already on 9.1 as part of the software update above. Tried rebuilding, repairing, everything. Nothing works. Eventually copied out the Old Masters into my home directory and created a brand new iPhoto Library and imported everything back in. Just hoping I did not lose any of my photos but I definitely lost all the events and books (obviously).
I have some backups but they are a few months old unfortunately. And I did not even think to back up before upgrading to iPhoto '11 since I have never had an issue with an Apple iPhoto upgrade in the past. Sigh

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