WP Was working, installed some plug-ins, now 403 Forbidden

I had this WP site working well this evening. It’s the latest version. I installed a plug-in called IThemes Security, and went to activate it. Immediately got a 403 – Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /wp-login.php on this server.

In the WAMP Apache error log, I have the following lines corresponding to each failure (just a sample):

[Wed May 14 23:34:25.547800 2014] [core:crit] [pid 3952:tid 860] (OS 5)Access is denied. : [client ::1:50638] AH00529: C:/wamp/www/VolZone/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable and that ‘C:/wamp/www/VolZone/’ is executable
[Wed May 14 23:37:14.168200 2014] [core:crit] [pid 3952:tid 860] (OS 5)Access is denied. : [client ::1:50677] AH00529: C:/wamp/www/VolZone/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable and that ‘C:/wamp/www/VolZone/’ is executable

I went to .htaccess; the file was there but all data had been erased. I had a copy of .htaccess from another working blog and I copied that one over. Still Forbidden. What a mess.

OK, so I figure the IThemes Security plug in has got something to do with this. Because looking through the Apache log, 403s began to happen right after I attempted to activate this plug in (after having activated several plug ins right before it). So I tried moving the folder to an directory outside the doc root. No help.

But I can’t log in now to back it out or disable it. All this work now hangs in the balance.

How do I recover from this? Am I going to have to restart from scratch?

H