Well, back to square one.

I have found that with 1.5.4, if you turn on authorize customer, multisite seems to just quit working. There is a bug in 1.5.4 that requires a small code change which is in place. So I guess it is related to this bug.

At first the site that required the login to browse just thru a session error.

[21-Mar-2015 08:21:39 America/New_York] PHP Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /home/user/public_html/includes/config_sites/www.domain.com_config.php:5) in /home/user/public_html/includes/functions/sessions.php on line 115

After I changed that to browse with no prices, I thought I had avoided the problem. But found out that though you can get to the login, you can't login without an error or logout without an error.

So I decided to start with the database from the other site. The one that doesn't have customer authorization turned on. If I put this in the config site file:

define('CUSTOMERS_APPROVAL_AUTHORIZATION','1');

I get the same results. It just will not work with customer authorization turned on in any fashion.