Access Denied to User 1 to View User Pages, Operations Column empty

Subject says it.

These are NOT clean installs, but they are standard installs with minimal content running from a recent git pull (11 Aug 2013).

On two different installs logged in as user 1, I am unable to visit any user pages, including the one for user/1 (i.e. my own user page). In addition, in admin/people, the Operations column is blank.

It works fine on a clean install on the same servers. So somewhere in the process of pointing and clicking, I was able to break this, but since I don't visit that page often, not sure when/where/how. I know that's not much help, but it's bound to come up again since I don't think I did anything particularly strange.

This only affects access to user pages - all other admin pages work fine and the Administrator role has all available permissions.

All of these paths give Access Denied errors
/user
/user/1
/user/8
/user/1/edit
/user/8/edit
etc

This is true on two systems:

- CentOS 5, Apache 2.2.22, PHP 5.3.13
- Win8, Apache 2.4.2, PHP 5.4.3

This is not related to #1112824: Access Denied for /user/login when user is already logged in which is a UI/feature issue.