We got this problem with our web hosting customers’ wordpress blogs a while back when recompiling one of our servers to php 5.3.2 (Apache/CentOS)
Apparently this version of php excluded an old php system call that reports if a server supports mod_rewrite or not, and since WP’s internal functions makes use of this call when displaying the permalinks page it obviously failed.
>> All blogs worked again after recompiling to php 5.2.13
