Make world and portupgrade

I am using freebsd 6.0. I really am liking bsd over linux however ever time I run a portupgrade on it I start having problems all over the place. Like Firefox died then I finaly got it working and then I xfce4 stop working. I just can't seem to keep an up2date system and the system be stable and work.

I have read about using make world and such to upgrade. I am wondering if portupgrade is a safer way to do it or if I should be using the make world and such. Or do they update differant things?

I want to use the stable releases and I think I may be using release releases. I am using freebsd-6.0-release. I can't find any iso for stable releases. I think the stable will work better in general than the release version.

I am just looking for a nice stable system that will work when I want it to work. SO I don't think I need the cutting edge when it comes to packages I can wait a few months to get the LATEST stuff.

They update completely different things.

* make world and friends upgrade the base OS system that you installed from the CD (or via FTP or whatever). This means, it will upgrade the kernel, device drivers, system utilities, commands, C compiler etc. (basically, things under /bin, /sbin, /etc, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /dev). It does not touch anything that you installed via ports or packages.

* portupgrade is used to update only the software that you installed via ports/packages (usually, software installed from ports/packages are installed under /usr/local tree). It doesn't touch the OS part of things at all.

to fix the problem with why portupgrade is killing my pc I was told about this great article at onlamp. It talks about the proper why to upgrade your system. I wasn't giving enough flags to portupgrade and i wasn't updating the portdb they right way.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/28/FreeBSD_Basics.html