Comment 34 for bug 973951

I have just encountered this problem with 12.04 and have tried every "fix" I can find withour sucess.

I am collecting a lot of errors in the mysql error.log

130506 16:59:00 [ERROR] Incorrect definition of table mysql.proc: expected column 'comment' at position 15 to have type text, found type char(64).
ERROR: 1136 Column count doesn't match value count at row 1
130506 16:59:01 [ERROR] Aborting

Mysql suggests

"Due to these changes, the server requires that a new grant table, proxies_priv, be present in the mysql database. If you are upgrading to MySQL 5.5.7 from a previous MySQL release rather than performing a new installation, the server will find that this table is missing and exit during startup with the following message:
Table 'mysql.proxies_priv' doesn't exist

To create the proxies_priv table, start the server with the --skip-grant-tables option to cause it to skip the normal grant table checks, then run mysql_upgrade."

#mysql --skip-grant-tables

Appears to run but

#mysql_upgrade

Fails

Looking for 'mysql' as: mysql
Looking for 'mysqlcheck' as: mysqlcheck
Running 'mysqlcheck' with connection arguments: '--port=3306' '--socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock'
mysqlcheck: Got error: 2002: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) when trying to connect
FATAL ERROR: Upgrade failed