Plugin activation causing weird errors 2.2.2

I’m attempting to roll out a new site today and am having fits with plugins activating. I have the entire site working on MAMP on my mac all plugins activated and everything working. When i try to roll out onto a live server things go nutty. I’ll do my best to explain.

here are the plugins I am using:

1. UTW or Simple Tagging (take your pick)
2. WP-Postratings
3. WP-Postviews
4. Post-Thumb Revisited

I can activate Postratings, Postviews and Post-Thumb without a problem. When I attempt to activate a tagging plugin, wordpress admin does the following:

1. the plugin doesnt activate. Instead, the link to activate downloads plugins.php to my desktop
2. Refreshing downloads it again
3. Clicking on the menu item Plugins downloads it also

I can remove the tagging plugin and things work fine. I’ve tested this by adding a plugin like hello dolly and all other plugins including the new one (hello dolly) work fine. Add the tagging plugin back in a bam… same problem. it doesnt seem to matter which of the two plugins i use UTW or simple tagging.

I’m on a UNIX server, plenty of resources (the whole box is ours), its hosted on Rackspace and has several other WP installs running with no problem. (various versions, various plugins).

I’ve stripped everything off the server and have rolled back to 2.2.1. Simple Tagging triggers a fatal error on activation as does UTW. I didnt see that error in 2.2.2.

I stuck hello dolly back on and it activates with no problem. It could be a conflict between the tagging plugins and one of my others.

If anyone can help or needs more info to help, please let me know. I’ll provide everything I can.

Thanks!