Plugin Update Fail, New Installs are Okay

Hi there everyone.

The problem: No plugins will update.

Unpacking the update
Deactivating the plugin
Removing the old version of the plugin
Could not remove the old plugin
Plugin upgrade Failed

The result is all the files belonging to the old plugin are deleted but the new ones do not appear. A 0 byte tmp file belonging to the plugin is created in the content folder.

Permissions for the folders are:
blog install root – 700
content – 755
plugins – 700

I have double checked my db name and pw in the config file.

Blog is on client’s Earthlink server. I can’t change that. Earthlink’s WP policy is to disown you once you modify the WP code of their standard (locked) install.

I have searched for fixes and have tried a few that I found:

1) Since I use BulletProof security, I have deactivated it. No change.

2) Added define(‘FS_METHOD’, ‘direct’); to config file. No change.

3) Added the following lines to config file

define(‘FS_METHOD’, ‘ftpsockets’);
define(‘FTP_BASE’, ‘/path/to/wordpress/’);
define(‘FTP_CONTENT_DIR’, ‘/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/’);
define(‘FTP_PLUGIN_DIR ‘, ‘/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/’);
define(‘FTP_USER’, ‘toplevelusername’);
define(‘FTP_PASS’, ‘toplevelpassword’);
define(‘FTP_HOST’, ‘ftp.example.org’);

which resulted in an ftp failure and a screen with grayed out name and password fields that I could not type into.

4) Changed permissions of plugins dir to 755. No change.

I’m at a loss and have read through many of the old posts here and concluded that those who can’t solve their issue end up manually updating plugins. Thing is, I am due to update to 3.5 and an scared to death that it’s going to fail, too.

Any suggestions? Thanks!