Migrating to Joomla 1.7

Is there a procedure to migrate CB/CBsubs/GJ from our J1.5 site to a new J1.7 site?

Not really, it's a painful process migrating. You'll need to export and re-import your CB users though and for that I recommend CB Juice.

I use direct database manipulation, but I don't really recommend that.

I believe jUpgrade supports CB though and should allow for pretty painless migration. You may need to go through and re-set some of the access permissions as the ACL changed quite a bit.

we tried using jupgrade - it created a new instance and some of the components came though alright (like Kunena), but none of the CB components did. We got the error screen attached and none of the CB components made it through.

You'll need to contact them about that, sorry. Like I said migration is a nightmare and there's no getting around data loss, you will lose some data. I've always installed CB then directly copied over my CB database tables. Once done I exported from _users, used REGEX to mass modify the export file, re-imported my users. Now that the users exist I manually exported and re-imported the usergroups mapping database table. It's a lot of manual database work, but has zero user loss. I don't recommend this approach unless you've very good experience with database usage otherwise please use migration tools and CB Juice.

Thanks - so I assume we have to manually migrate CBsubs and GJ data as well? Can you suggest a sequence for the key pieces (CB, CBsubs, GJ, and Kunena)?

As long as user_ids remain the same you can quite literally copy and paste your CB, CBSubs, and GJ database tables. jUpgrade I hear does pretty well moving _users and their ACL while keeping user_id so you may want to move the users first then database export and database import your CB, GJ, and CBSubs tables.