An old adage goes something like:
Test twice, deploy once.
But in my case, I should have tested thrice…
Within moments of version 4.4 pushing live in the WP Repo, mediagrin posted an issue in the WP Forums…
It appears I had inadvertently deleted a ' while I was updating the jQuery version number (at the end of line 483 in admin-menu.php, to be precise…).
And thanks to Chip Bennett at WP, version 4.4.1 went live in the repo within minutes of my pushing it up (and begging for his help, yet again).
So, big fat thanks to mediagrin and Chip Bennett, and even bigger and fatter apologies to anyone else that experienced this problem…
At any rate, version 4.4.1 is now live in the WP Repo, and appears to be working just fine…
Happy WordPressing,
Atg