Cannot Login to Admin Panel

Hello,

I’m really hope someone can help me here as I am well out of my depth..

I had my website designed and programmed/uploaded back in March 2011 by two nice chaps. All worked well ( I don’t know the Word press version)and I was shown how to update the blog..

In November this year I logged on ( I only update it every month or so). I got into the admin panel as usual but it would not let me add posts or images to the gallery. I couldn’t get hold of the guys who set it up so chanced an upgrade ( in retrospect I should have I guess). I was immediately locked out of the admin – the same login page appears when I entered the username/password.

To summarise:

I got hold of the original chap and he said he couldn’t help – he resent the password for me but said he could get in either

– so having been through the forum this evening I learnt how to and tried the following:

– cleared cookies, cache, dns cache and disk clean up
– downloaded an FTP ( Cute FTP) programme and downloaded the whole site to backup
– through my Host? I found I could use the phpMyAdmin where I changed it to my email ( not the old programmers) and did the password change here as on forum)
– tried the wp_options to change the plugins to autoload – no
– renamed the plugins folder to plugins-old and copied and blank plugins folder instead.

I’ve tried staring blankly at my cat

can anyone help with this one at all?

thanks

Ash