Following lockout, reactivating of plugin fails

Hi there, after having what seemed to be lock out errors, I removed the better wp security plugin manually from the plugins folder and all was well with my site. I have tried the latest version, backups from a week go, restored htaccess etc.. and still i am not able to access the site with wp security installed. I have empted the bwp_lockouts db table which showed it was blocking my ip address.

On attempt to network activate, the process simply times out – it will refuse to activate. I am using wordpress multsite, and although this is a development server I am using – this doesn’t give me confidence to continue using it on my live domain. It just times out on multsite, and installing separatly on a subsite, just says fatal error. I have tried this with no other plugins installed and same issue…

Are there are any other db tables i can delete to try and reset this plugin?

Is there any way to place an ip address in the whitelist before activating the site perhaps? Maybe thats the problem?

I don’t allow the plugin to edit htaccess in fear of breaking it – which it has done in the past. I swear though, it doesn’t pay attention to the option of not changing it. Here is the top of my current htaccess:

# BEGIN Better WP Security
Options -Indexes

<files .htaccess>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</files>

<files readme.html>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</files>

<files readme.txt>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</files>

<files install.php>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</files>

<files wp-config.php>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</files>

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

Thanks

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/better-wp-security/