wordpress/wp-admin SSL

Hey,

So we’ve been banging our heads against the walls with this one.

We have two servers. A development, and a live. The live is essentially an exact copy of the dev as far as the wp-admin is concerned.

When visiting the http://dev-domain.com/wordpress/wp-admin on the DEV site it allows us in, it isn’t SSL and all the features within work perfectly.

When visiting the http://live-domain.com/wordpress/wp-admin on the LIVE site it redirects us to the /sign-in/ page of the whole site (front end)

when visiting the https://live-domain.com/wordpress/wp-admin on the LIVE site it allows us in, it IS on an SSL link, and none of the features work properly due to the following error: (as an example)

XMLHttpRequest cannot load https://www.live-domain.com/wordpress/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php. Origin https://www.live-domain.com is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin. nav-menus.php:1

Now, I can’t think of any valid reason why LIVE and DEV would behave differently but because its trying to find admin-ajax.php on a non-secure url from a https:// version of the wp-admin, it means that none of the buttons work and we are getting all these Xdomain errors.

Ideally we’d like both to work off SSL. but with as little setup work as possible as we have a very tight timescale on this it may be easier to work out why wp-admin is even forcing us to be on https:// in the first place.

Has anyone encountered a problem like this before? We have gone through and looked at FORCE_SLL and FORCE_ADMIN_SSL and is_ssl() function and tried to hardcode values as a test to see if we can get around it.
Better still, we commened out the auth_redirect() function and it at least stops the redirect back to /sign-in/. But instead sits on a wordpress ERROR page telling us we do not have sufficient permissions……. Could this be account based SSL? My login perms happens to screwed up?

Hope someone can make head or tail of this!

Thank. Simon