All items disapear when saving custom menu

Very weird problem.

When trying to build a custom menu (Appearance -> Menus) I can drag pages over to create a menu. As soon as I click save, I get a message that says “Menu has been updated” but all the items disappear.

I’ve been though the standard trouble shooting step of disabling all the plugins with still the same problem.

What’s really odd it that I have a dev system running with all the same plugins, and theme and an environment that is very similar to the hosting company (ReliableHosting). It’s CentOS 6 LAMP – AND I DON’T HAVE the problem on the dev system! I can create a bunch of menu items and add them to widgets with no problem.

I did read the forums on the issues with suhosin.post.max_vars = 5000
and suhosin.request.max_vars = 5000 in PHP, and I have opened a ticket with the hosting company, but this doesn’t seem like that type of issue. I only have 1 other menu, with only 3 items in it.

The theme technically only supports 1 menu (but multiple menus works on my dev system), however as a test I did add a second menu to the functions.php in the theme via register_nav_menu(‘footer-menu’, ‘Footer Menu’ ). The admin panel recognizes it, I can select it, and add to it, with the same results that the items disappear but WordPress says “Menu Updated”

I also tried multiple browsers, and creating another admin user just to ensure I wasn’t fighting one of those issues: still no luck.

This acts more like a permissions or db issue, and I’m completely stymied. Any help would be appreciated!