Ever have one of those days where everything that was working, has now stopped working, and there hasn't been any change to the system ? Evidently something has changed, but you don't know what it is.
I used to have a smoothly functioning FancyCaptcha with ConfirmEdit system running just fine. Now I discover that users can no longer create accounts because the Captcha image is not being displayed. The IMG tag is generated in the create account form, but the returned image size is zero, and the IMG area disappears. When I input directly the URL for the Captcha image, e.g.: http://myhost.edu/index.php?title=Special:Captcha/image&wpCaptchaId=2350... the Wiki responds: Permission error You are not allowed to execute the action you have requested.
The IMG tag in the create account form appears as: img src="/index.php?title=Special:Captcha/image&wpCaptchaId=235016017" width="331" height="114"
But I can't figure out what permissions are being violated here ? I placed debug print statements in the FancyCaptcha.php business, and it is merrily going about its business, scanning the images directory, generating these CaptchaId's and height and width numbers from the images, and yet the page will not function. There are no extra error messages in the Apache error log.
Any hints on what to check for this situation ?
--Hiram