Cannot upgrade/delete plugins, through wp or maually

I have a problem, I cannot add/upgrade/delete plugins, either manually or through wordpress (v. 2.9.2.).

The auto-update worked before, but recently I had my hosting company change the ownership of plugins and uploads folder to apache.

Ever since then, wordpress asks for ftp information and then fails at upgrading plugins.

I have searched the forums and tried a few different sugggestions but to no avail.

From talking with the customer service rep at my hosting company, there was a problem writing to a tmp folder, but now he says that is solved after
I added define(“WP_TEMP_DIR”, “/usr/local/pem/vhosts/111698/tmp/”); to wp-config.php

The rep said:

“This appears to have resolved the tmp folder errors, but there shouldn’t be any issue with the script removing the files/folders – they’re all owned by Apache and PHP is running as an Apache module.

I’m afraid I’m not able to offer much more in the way of an explanation here – from the server side in terms of file ownership/permissions, this should be working.

You may want to go back to the WP community forums and see if anyone else has had similar issues.”

I have tried a few different methods suggested on these forums, but still nothing.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I could at least upgrade the plugins manually.