Obscure solution – "You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page"

Hi folks

Came across a post asking about the error “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page” when trying to log into wp-admin and none of their solutions worked for me.

That topic is closed so I had to create a new post for a possible solution:

My installation of wordpress was in a subdirectory of a different site. In the parent directory, the parent directory had a .htaccess with a DirectoryIndex defined in it.
One of the values had a big long query string including a page parameter.
i.e. index.php?blah=x&foo=bar&page=15

Of course, this propogated down the directory structure to my wordpress installation, which uses “page” to define what admin page you’re looking at, and comes up with the hook name depending on that. It didn’t understand “15” and came up with “dashboard_page_15” which isn’t defined as a page I have permission to (because it doesn’t exist) and so told me I don’t have permission to access the page.

The solution?

In my .htaccess of the WordPress installation I override the DirectoryIndex with just index.php and index.html and all is well.