error 500 when accessing admin area

I have been racking my brain trying to solve a problem and I have seen others have. Yes, I have come here and other places on the web to track this down. here is the situation -

I came into this job with an already installed installation of Zencart. My current employer is a former client from a business my ex-wife and I used to run together and I had been called in before coming on board to troubleshoot issues.

When I first set up my current employers web site we did not set it up using Zencart but rather a competing e-commerce solution. No big deal. However information and documentation was not provided such as the changing of the admin directory name.

After I discovered the admin folder was named to something else I decided to upload some modules I had unsuccessful tried to upload some files to what I though was the real admin folder. Well after doing this I am not able to get into the admin and I have already checked .htaccess files, config files, etc. and isolated what I thought may be the files that have caused the problem.

I'm pretty fluent in php, mysql, etc. but looking all the lines of code of something that may have broken my access to the admin area has brought a halt to my work in a big way. I have however installed the newest version(1.5.0)of Zencart in a separate directory and it's doing great and I would be perfectly content just mirgrating to the new directory however on big issue. I am not able to access my database via the current working install. I have tried to import but when I try to upgrade the database from a recent install I get errors regarding tab spaces,etc. I have tried to clean these up in a text editor to no avail. the import still wonks out. It did however import my categories but not products so I guess that is something. Any other suggestions? I won't worry about the access to the current install if I can get the install in the new folder working.

Unless otherwise specified I will withhold including code or links at this time for security reasons.

1. have you read the tutorials pages here, and post back if something clicks

https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=63
Possibly as well
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=82

2. Have you checked the websites zen /cache folder, normally located at yoursite.com/cache, this is folder created by zencart to store any errors it hits, doesn't catch everything, but may help

3. Press reply and fill in the posting tips, that appear above the text area box, as that can help narrow down some issues

4. Obviously as its an admin link we aren't going to ask for the link

5. If you do fix it make sure you post back and tell us.

Yes, I have looked at article 63 countless times. I'm looking over article 82 again. I have looked at it quite a few times. I can tell you that their is nothing in my cache files like those error messages you mentioned. It has occurred to me that not seeing any error messages their may may an indicator of a problem too. I have checked file permissions which all check out OK. Looking for any syntax or customization errors. Hope this narrows it down.

As far as your import not working properly, perhaps you're not exporting it appropriately?
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=103