I had an old site (V1.3.5) that I never really got around to setting up. The site was functional but I only created a handful of pages and then got sidetracked with other projects. I recently decided to upgrade to 3.0 so I renewed my license. Since it would be too much work to upgrade through the various versions I decided to overwrite everything and just do a clean install.
All went well until i tried to view the store front and/or try to log into the backend. All I see is “Access Denied” in the upper left hand corner after going to any url on my site. This is about my 10th time doing a CS-cart installation and I have never seen this before. So it shouldn't be anything obvious but maybe I missed something. Any suggestions?
Every php file in cs-cart starts out with
if( !defined('AREA') ) die('Access denied');
This is to prevent any page from being called directly without going through index.php or admin.php. I don't know about 1.3.5, but I would guess you have some left-over there that is trying to access a page directly. When you said you did a clean install, did you really start with extracting the archive into a clean directory? Or did you extract it into one where files existed? Very difficult to find the culprit since all files use the same message (difficult for you and for a hacker which is what's intended).
What I did was extracted the files locally and uploaded them to the server overwriting all existing files. This may have been a mistake? It let me go through the entire set-up process (mysql set up, license input, etc.) without issues. Just none of the urls work now for accessing the front or backend of the site. As you said it sounds like there may be a leftovers that may be causing the issue but not sure what.