I have 3.4.4 and love it! Through WP I see I can automatically upgrade to 3.4.9 but when I do so it says if I proceed I will lose all my customization....I have spent a ton of time customizing everything in the theme and don't want to lose it...Is there a way to upgrade and keep everything I have customized?
Thanks!

I recommend doing the upgrade manually for two reasons
1) you can have both versions of the theme in the theme folder and switch back and forth.
2) I've seen too many posts where the Wordpress automatic upgrade seems to have a problem and things don't work after the upgrade.

Thanks for the reply...I can certainly download the new version but then how would I get all my settings, customization, etc from 3.4.4 version into the new 3.4.9 version? I realize the newer version allows you to import and export settings but I don't believe the old one does so not sure what to do here...

any customizations you do via the theme options are stored in teh WordPress database in teh wp-options table. The only thing you might loose are any CODE changes you made to teh php modules that make up the theme.

The only other thing you need to do is make copies of any images you added to the atahualpa/images or atahualpa/images/header folders. Those images need to be copied to the new versions folder and if you referenced them directly in the theme options, you will need to change the reference. For example, if you used a background image and specified
url{./wp-content/themes/atahualpa/images/xxx.jpg)
you would have to change 'atahualpa' to 'atahualpa351'