It does seem as if some sites are able to make it work. Since I just migrated to a dedicated server I have occasionally had to reset permissions to enable read write functions and I wonder if this might be part of the problem in some way
No, this is the actual line define(‘BP_ROOT_BLOG’, 3 );
I should also note this is a subdirectory multisite install where the primary mu site is an established blog (mgx.com) and the buddypress subsite is in a virtual subdirectory. http://mgx.com/blogs/cafe