Why the Wordpress Administration did not load anymore and a solution

Like many people, I totally dig WordPress as my preferred Blog software (despite it being written in PHP, but that is another story:-) ). The way I have WordPress installed my Linux host is that I get the latest stable releases with subversion directly from wordpress.org. So far, I have had never problems with it. But…

Since 2 days I could not access the WordPress Administration anymore. The page, after login, did load, but instead of the Dashboard I always saw a blank page with the browser still loading 11 of 12 elements. After some digging around and getting to know Firebug better each time, I saw that the “Thickbox.css” could not be loaded. Even calling it directly within the browser did not load the CSS. The same behavior was found on 3 other blogs I run.

After opening the thickbox.css file I saw that the writer had a couple of comment tags on top of some styles that looked like this:

/* —————————————————————————————————————-*/
/* ———->>> thickbox settings <<<—————————————————————————–*/
/* —————————————————————————————————————-*/

While nothing looked suspicious here, I nevertheless removed the comments (since I experienced some other weird stuff with comments in the past) and low and behold the WordPress Administration did load again without problems.

I’m not sure, where to put this in now, with a configuration of Apache or some malfunction of PHP, but I got a running WordPress again.

Hope this helps someone out there.