Redmine

I am a complete newbie to Redmine and Ruby and Rails. Running on Windows. Here is my configuration:
activerecord (2.3.11)
activeresource (2.3.11)
activesupport (2.3.11)
cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.5.0)
gem_plugin (0.2.3)
i18n (0.4.2)
mongrel (1.1.5 x86-mingw32)
mongrel_service (0.3.4 i386-mswin32)
mysql (2.8.1 x86-mingw32)
rack (1.1.2)
rails (2.3.11)
rake (0.8.7)
win32-service (0.5.2 mswin32)
win32-service (0.5.2 mswin32)
Apache 2.2
MySQL 5.5

Nonetheless, I was able to get two installs to work (production and development instances) following the instructions in the doc. How to install redmine in a sub-uri on windows with apache. The release of redmine I installed is 1.0.4.

Once users started to use the system I wanted to upgrade to 1.2.2. I didn’t want to kill my two installs, so I created a third 1.0.4 redmine version on my local PC and attempted to upgrade it to 1.2.2 by following the instructions in the Redmine upgrade doc. I have a few questions with which I am hoping someone can help.

The upgrade doc talks about unzipping the Redmine archive into a new directory which I did (I called it \redmine-1.2.2). Once I finished the upgrade process (lot of problems but I did get it to work) I had no idea how Mongrel was going to find the new redmine file system so what I did was rename the old redmine folder (which was called \redmine) and renamed the new one to \redmine.
How is Redmine found by Mongrel? Could I have changed some config file to tell Mongrel where to find the new version so I would not have had to rename the folders? Where is this information stored?

Also, how does one change operating modes (RAILS_ENV) from, let’s say, production to development? Is this information stored in a particular config file somewhere? Can anyone offer any help please?

Thanks.

richard