There should be virtually no problems running your examples from 1.4, as Chrazy said there was a modification to the attr() method, but in many circumstances it still runs on same code
You can easily get almost all versions of jQuery from Google CDN which doesn't require downloading, simply changing the SRC slightly in a script tag.
This will help you realize it isn't version that is failing
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6/jquery.min.js"></script>
Just change version number and stick it in a page
Posting some examples of failing code would also help