Steve (Mr Papa) – did you manage to find time to look at this site? Sent you a PM on it.

assuming its the same link as in post #1:  http://www.biugsa.co.za/ I did look and posted some comments in #11…   but one of my points is the site looks nothing like the images being posted…  and the site works because it has default permalinks every time I look…

and the site does have interesting js in that is has special css for windows clients vs macs…  and js errors to boot… likely not related to permalinks though…

I dont see a pm, but had 300 the other day so pruned away and may be removed it…

one thing I cannot tell if tested, but you have set the forum page as the main page…  it you temp remove that and make it just a normal wp page, does it make a difference?  with other permalinks of course…  wondering if it being set to the main page could be throwing it off…  shouldnt as its long worked that way, but another data point…

ok… tried changing the default homepage page to another page, then also changed the permalink to the custom structure – still no joy. Still the same issue as before.

Mr Papa – as I explained, the site in the pictures is somehow the hosts default error page, hence the difference.

and your .htaccess is now standard wp?   can you update permalinks from the wp – settings – permalinks page with no warnings or errors? basically, making sure permissions are right on that file…

yes… the htaccess file contains only what you asked me to put there.

I can change the permalinks without error.

I really don’t know what to suggest. As I am sure you have realised neither of us here can really work out what is going on with your environment and it has to be environmental to some degree. I don’t think we have ever been defeated by something like this before.

One last thing that might be worth investigating is to ask your host if they have imposed ‘mod_security’ on your server and, if they have, could they turn it off even if just for testing. This module is the bain of all developers as it can block urls it deems may be suspicious based on pattern matching. I doubt this is it but a really aggressive mod_security setup can cause all sorts of problems.