bambarbie

I thought that might be it–just wanted to be sure before deactivating a dead plugin, lest I mess myself up. Deactivated, activated yours, we’re all good. Seriously, thank you so much.

I imagine we’ll probably have to reinstall WordPress on the server, but I’m not quite sure how to do that. I’m familiar with PHP and with web development in general, but I’m new to WordPress specifically. How would we go about the reinstall while maintaining the content, themes, layout, etc.?

Hey, I’m OP’s friend and I’ve been taking a look at the server via FTP to see what’s going on.
What seems to be happening is that something is corrupting the .htaccess file, duplicating entire chunks of the file and placing the extra code at the beginning of the file. I go in and remove the extra code and the site will work for about a day until I encounter the same problem again, with a different chunk. It looks like some module or extension is incorrectly rewriting .htaccess. Is there anything known to cause an error like that?

I did the .plugins and bak.htaccess (I assumed you didn’t mean bak.htacccess) and I get the same error notice.

Here’s what it’s got for today in the php error log:

[07-Jan-2013 05:50:41] WordPress database error You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘(8) )’ at line 12 for query CREATE TABLE wp_simple_feed_stats ( id mediumint(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, logtime varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”, request varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”, referer varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”, type varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”, qstring varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”, address varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”, tracking varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”, agent varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”, PRIMARY KEY (id), cur_timestamp TIMESTAMP(8) ) made by include(‘wp-config.php’), require_once(‘wp-settings.php’), do_action(‘init’), call_user_func_array, sfs_create_table, dbDelta

That seems to repeat a lot, unless they’re slightly different and I can’t tell because I don’t speak this language.
I took C++ in high school–fat lot of good that’s doing me. Thank you so much for your help!!