Thanks for your time.
A year ago i did a static html-substitute website (not a qwerty website) and it has run without issues. Tonight is the first time in a year that i needed to log in as an administrator - to make a simple modification to the contact page. When i provide the login user name and password I get the "view" "edit" "contact" "track page visits" tabs as expected but when I select "edit" i get the Access Denied message.
A few months ago we changed hosts and the process was uneventful. i did a manual transfer by backing up the folders plus the db and then manually ftp'ing the folders to the new host as an addon domain and then did an import of the db, set up the user privilages in cpanel and modified the settings.php file to point to the new data base. I just compared the settings.php file in use today to the pre-move backup and no other changes were made, not even to the $base_url which is 'http://url.com'; without the www.
I've tried it with the www in the $base_url and no luck.
I went through the steps of requesting a new password tonight and it seemed to go through all the steps correctly including the one time login to submit a new password, yet the old password remains in place and the new password is not recognized. The settings.php file is 644.
I've tried two browsers and deleted cookies. Firefox and opera on my mac.