Thank you so much for taking the time to share your findings.

One note, in my previous posts on this topic, I mistakingly
thought you were trying to upgrade to an even newer version (2.1)
that is not bundled in Fantastico (yet). The instructions above
would get you to 2.01, but the captcha table is not used by that version.

Afterwords, you could upgrade that to 2.1 which already has the PATH_INFO fix
and does use the captcha table, as well as includes some other frequently requested features, like banlists