You are going to need to supply a little more detail on the events as there is too little to formulate much of an opinion on what is happening.
Simply deactivating BP should not produce a server error- what server error? they are generally given error codes to narrow down what issue the server is happening. What do your server logs say? these are the first port of call when encountering issues with servers as they will provide detail as to what was happening or instruction attempted to complete but failed for whatever reason.
Hi @hnla it’s a 500 error – I will see if there is anything in the server logs
I do have cloudflare running, I’m not sure if that might be causing an issue
Do I need to switch off the buddypress theme before deactivating buddypress?
It’s a pretty good idea to deactivate the BP theme before deactivating BP, though strictly speaking it should not be necessary. Having a BP theme active while deactivating BP will mean that visitors to your site will see a white screen. However, the Dashboard of your site should still be available. You should *not* be seeing 500 errors when you attempt to visit http://example.com/wp-admin.
I’m not sure what cloudflare is – I looked at their site and I don’t get it. Is it a caching plugin of some sort? It’s possible that a caching plugin might cause this sort of problem. Generally, what other plugins are you running?
Hi @boonebgorges I have a whole host of plugins running, 41 in total a lot of those are extending BP, I can list them if you think it will help.
I can switch all of those off and the site will run, it’s just when I switch off BP do I get the 500 error.
Cloudflare is a caching/CDN system
Have you done any customizations to .htaccess?
@boonebgorges – I really appreciate your help on this. I think I have, mainly to do with expiration on files, do you think that will do it? I should be able to grab an .htaccess from the original wp zip file and overwrite the existing one.
Simple enough to try but you don’t overwrite these types of files ever always change it’s file name i.e turn it into a backup then upload another version, it’s a basic *nix principle.
If you can revert to an older version of the .htaccess, it might be worth a test. 500 errors suggest that WP is not even loading in the absence of BP, which suggests that there might be something funky happening at the htaccess level.
Hi @boonebgorges it’s taken me a while to get round to this, after the last time I was a bit nervous to try it out.
I’ve reverted to an old .htaccess file, but it’s still not working, everything is fine until I switch off Buddypress and I get a 500 Internal server error. The only way back was to reactivate the plugin through the database.
Has anyone got any other ideas?
Thanks
Ok, I did this again and it’s worked!! hooray!
This time round I activated a wordpress (non-buddypress) theme before deactivating, which seemed to do the trick.
I’m now on WP 3.1.2 BP and 2.8, finally 
Had the same problems on a multisite installation. Didn’t try deactivation of the bp-theme. In my case I just overwrote the buddypress plugin and then made my modifications.
