Plugins page goes blank when activating plugins

I am having massive issues adding any plugin, everytime I activate it the page goes blank and the only way to fix it is to rename/remove the plugin manually from the ftp. I think this may be due to importing the database from an older installation but I am not sure. I replaced all of the files manually with the latest 3.04 installation but it doesn’t seem to have helped. The last 2 plugins I tried to install were recaptcha and wp-database backup, please advise!