[Roxanne]

Okay, after literally hours of phone calls, trial-and-error, google searches and bugging the tech guys at my hosting company I finally found the fix. I’ll outline here in case anyone has this same issue in the future.

First of all this is a HUGE wordpress-mu issue. There are tons of folks out there with the same problem, which is apparently related to folks on dedicated servers.

The problem I finally realized was my FTP client couldn’t actually change the read/write on blogs.dir
I kept doing a chmod but didn’t see that it never took. Once I realized the problem I found out that somehow wordpress-mu creates new files/folders dynamically using apache:apache as the owner:group. So the server then denied the creation because it wasn’t the right “owner” for those permissions.

Here was my fix (hopefully I haven’t mucked up my security too much doing this).

1) I turned off safe mode in Plesk. I’m hoping since I’m the only one in there, this won’t be too big of an issue.
2) I used an SSH login session to go to my wp-content directory
3) I did a chown OWNERNAME:GROUPNAME blogs.dir -R command
4) went back to my FTP session and did a chmod on the blogs.dir folder recursively

Now it appears to work (*fingers crossed*)