Would pulling the 4.5.x version and following the 'upgrading your moduless' steps at http://drupal.org/node/12347 be sensible?
That should be a good way to deal with it, it will teach you some drupal internals ;) looking at CVS : http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/workflow/ I saw that last version is 8 days old, so I don't know why a 4.6.x version hasn't been released. I guess that's because the maintainer ( John VanDyk ) is pretty busy working at the CCK (I can't stand the wait... see http://drupal.org/cck-status)
I'm surprised the basic ability for posts to have draft/published status isn't a huge issue for many people - even Movable Type has had this for years! That's all I'm needing at this point; fancy triggers and actions would be nice someday, but the basics would suffice.
I'm not sure you understood the objective of workflow module, it's not to provide draft/published status for node, this exists for a long time, the purpose was to provide a way to change the node status using the action module.
So check your drupal install, when you create a node, (if you get the right permissions of course), you can set it's status to published, promoted to front....
Regards
Nicolas