guppydas, appreciate all the help. please keep throwing the ideas out there…

but for reference we run suphp on this server so its not global to that…

phranker, do you have host support?  might be worth asking them why the web user cannot access those files…

might have missed the settings, but the dirs should be 0755 and the php files should be 0644…

So – I figured it out. It was the suPHP issue and what it was catching and error out on was; that “wp-content” was GROUP WRITABLE – go figure.

Not world writable, just user and group writable and thats what stopped the script from executing. FYI: I found the error in /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log which is what lead me to change the dirs permissions.

WOW!!

Thanks for all the help.

Hopefully this thread will help others.

good hunting… glad its resolved… but this in particular is not really suphp issue (especially since you are running fcgi)

thanks for the update!