cannot login after theme change or backup/restore I am using Drupal 7, with VMware 5.0.1 build-894247 with Ubuntu 12.10. 2GB ram, 20GB disk, 32 bit VM, hosted by Windows 7 Enterprise. 

I am developing on a team with SVN (subversion) as the source control. All of this works fine on everyone else's (on my team) local dev environment and on our staging/prod servers.

I set up a shared folder from my C: drive on Windows called Sites (C:\Sites), and it appeared as /mnt/hgfs/Sites on Linux.

My dev folder is under that, so /mnt/hgfs/Sites/test.dev

I configured Apache sites-available to point to this new path, and enabled it. I setup the mysql database fresh, and ran through the default install of Drupal. No problems so far. At this point I can log in and out without issue.

When I make a change like importing a theme and setting the theme, then log out, I can no longer log in. The login screen will not even tell me why I am not being logged in (normally there is an error message... it is as if someone disabled java-script or something). If I blow away the database and recreate it, start over with the default install, it works again. My real goal is to enable a backup and restore that to the new site, but that changes the theme and more, and has the same problem (although the theme does change and content is there when I do this... just can't log in)

another kicker, if I move the files back to /var/www/ and re-point apache, it works again.
UPDATE: It turns out this problem does not have to do with VMware, as it is now failing in the exact same manner while in /var/www.

I have checked permissions and even set everything to completely unrestricted access (chmod 777 -R).

Any ideas why?
This seems very reminiscent of this other post too...

UPDATE: after hours of diagnosis, discovering drush, and playing with variables, my buddy  noticed this: If we switch the theme back to Bartik, and login from  login, it will fail without even showing an error message. BUT, if we just go to the home page, there is a login block on the left, and if we login there, it works! The top nav bar comes back and everything. Log out and try again from http://sitename/users, and it fails again. He thinks it may be a modules or theme-based permissions issue.
Try the following:


check the existence of .htaccess file in Drupal root
truncate the cache tables in the database
check and eventually increase the PHP memory limit in /etc/php5/cli/php.ini
Read and check some other trouble shooting ideas at
http://drupal.org/node/158043