Thanks for your ideas, Chris, acutally I had families set up before I installed 3.3 with version 2 and they are still there, just not showing up in the actual catalog. In 3.3 I set up families in the administration interface and still nothing. I did a dumb thing too, didn't realize that I had to back up through the admin. file, I just downloaded the 'catalog' folder to my hard drive and figured that was good, so I can't go back to the previous sql file that was working fine, just couldnl't set up several families per product.
Now, for another question, when the installation file says "paste the following text at the "end" of the file..." it means before the <? yes? or is it really at the whole end after the php appears to be closed. If this doesn't make sense, I'm sorry. I'm so totally new to php that it intimidates me a bit. I was real cocky at first when the first version worked great, now my tail is between my legs .