So as RCmod said, we upgraded , applied the patch to 1.1.12.
The following is part of the issue i raised with DreamHost
our host:
There was no altering of the backend SMF source code other than selecting a theme. But this
forum has ran well for months on end without issue.
Recently I did switch to PHP 5.3 in the DreamHost panel as was suggested by the DH email.
It seems this issue is apparent in both Chrome and FireFox browsers. In Chrome, if I clear the
cache and cookies I can log in, but it seems to require entering the password twice as it always
seems to report the password wrong the first time; as is the case lately with logging into the
DreamHost panel.
So after clearing browser cache and cookies, log in is successful and I can get to the admin
panel. If I log out, fine. I try to log back in and the second login works, but I can't access the
admin panel as it asks for the password again. Then it says there was a session error, logout
and try again. But then when I try to logout, the same session error occurs as if stuck in some
recursive loop or something. So then I can't logout at all.
Since I have to log into the DreamHost panel twice, I thought there may be something in the
logs that point to the error(s) I can fix or report to SMF.
We were using SMF 1.1.11, but a reply at the SMF website forum suggested using the sercurity
mod patch fix that upgraded to 1.1.12. We did such with no errors, but the session issue still
looms dark and somewhat mysterious: