Over the last few weeks I’ve been struggling with a series of problems with my WP installations. I have this one on the root of my site and another in a sub directory. This one was WP 2.1 and when I installed the one in the sub directory it was WP 2.2. Not long after I started getting weird errors, the most obvious was the Dashboard was all messed up in both installations and displayed the index page of this blog in pieces all over the place making the Dashboard unusable. After repeated emails to my host they could not come up with a solution. Eventually after trying just about everything I could think of I deleted both installations and the databases and rebuilt each from scratch adding data to the databases table by table. This did not work. I then deleted this installation and replaced it with WP 2.1.3 this seemed to fix some of the problems but gave me some problems with my previous posts, so this wasn’t a complete solution.
After trawling the WP support forums for the various problems I was facing I came across the explanation that the problem seemed to lay with Ajax in the admin interface. Then I found this explanation which didn’t actually work for me but it was further confirmation that the problem was Ajax related. Digging deeper in the support forums I found another solution posted by macbrink who suggested the problem was that some servers blocked the headers in update Ajax scripts. The solution was to add an .htaccess file to the wp-admin folder with the following code
<IfModule mod_security.c> SecFilterInheritance Off </IfModule>
I must admit I don’t fully understand the solution but all I can say is that it fixed all the problems I was experiencing in one fell swoop.