I tried installing three XOOPS installations -- different domains on my shared webhosting account -- with WS-FTP 9.01.

One seems okay.

One wouldn't use sendmail to send activation letters to verify sign-ups.

One would use sendmail for the activation letters, but delivered some strange menus in the preferences section. I also noticed that when I logged into administration for the first time, I didn't get the red box that told me to delete the installation directly and permission mainfile.php to 444.

I recalled that a few weeks ago, I tried using a new theme on a differt CMS. I always got a parse error, as did others.

In that case, I used Direct FTP to upload the theme and it worked perfectly.

Aha! I deleted the two failed installations, and then used CuteFTP Pro to upload. I tried keeping the conditions the same and all that.

Both installations are working fine now.

I don't know if it's just weird coincidence, or if there's a bug in WS-FTP that makes it hiccup from time to time, or if the program just hates my computer. Or maybe I triggered an option in the program that messes things up. But I've noticed there are quite a few posts describing exactly my problem.

Who knows? Computers are funny things.

An edit -- What I'm getting at is that sometimes it seems WS-FTP botches the scripts that call sendmai.

Try enabling PHP debug in the administration menu->system admin->Preferences->general settings and go to the problematic pages and see if there are any error messages.

If the files are corrupted it is very likely that there will be some PHP errors.

Don't know if later versions of WS-FTP have this enabled by default as mine did, but the 'force lower-case remote names' option has caught me out before now. The upload succeeds, but of course files where upper-case characters have been converted to lower-case cannot be found by the application. I only discovered this when I did a painstaking file by file check to troubleshoot a PHP app that wouldn't work properly. I also have the 'binary' and 'auto' options checked.