Do you need AMS? It seemed to me, that you did not need ref-itu which also caused problems.
In case PO needs AMS, a person is required that is sufficiently familiar with AMS to fix it (i.e. to provide an upgrade script like the one i did for etp, maybe this could be as well just a one-liner). The upgrade script (with a bump in the AMS version number) should go into the CVS repository. Then an upgrade to the latest version version of all packages in an OpenACS 5.8 installation will fix this problem. After this the upgrade to OpenACS 5.9 will go smooth.
