I just spent over an hour last night upgrading one of my laptops to 11.10 because 12.04 was still beta. I guess I should have just waited one more day.
If you were coming from 11.04, you'd have to upgrade to 11.10 anyway, since you can only upgrade from one release directly to the next one, or one LTS to the next. That's why I suspect you were on 11.04 and not 10.04 (it's not possible to upgrade directly from 10.04 or 10.10 to 11.10).
The alternative would have been a clean reinstall.
So basically you did the right thing.
I installed and configured 11.10 from scratch last night. Now I'm going to do it all over (no upgrade) just out of spite.