Well, it's that time again, the annoying little message bar started showing up at the bottom of the phpMyAdmin screen. Fortunately I documented how to deal with this the last time it just got to be too much to put up with. It's actually pretty easy.
http://sottwell.com/articles/phpmyadmin.html
Of course, the fact that this whole version-upgrade message shows up at all makes it pretty clear that phpMyAdmin phones home...
Turns out you can stop the version checking in the config.inc.php file; simply uncomment the line
// $cfg['VersionCheck'] = FALSE;
☆ A M B ☆