Its looking like I may be able to just run with the latest clone of my production site instead of going back a month and staring again. The clone appears to work perfectly everywhere I have installed it so far.
BTW – In the last 24 hours (or thereabouts) I have also increased the PHP memory from my php.ini so this may have played some part in why the site clone and installations etc appear to be fine now. It was on 128mb so I tweaked it up to 512mb.
Once I make some plugin and theme updates (now that I can) and move it back to the production domain I will know either way. Hopefully it works there when I do. Based on some of the random things that have happened so far I will keep my fingers crossed until then. Clearly something weird has been going on when issues aren’t consistent.
NB: I now believe the security plugin stores some setting outside of the .htaccess file as I have noticed the strength meter sitting at around half way (despite the .htaccess being void of security settings) whereas once I implement everything I believe i can in the .htaccess file the security score sits on 435 out of 460 points.
So I’m not 100% sure if it blocks the GP Premium plugin or not at this stage. My gut feeling is it doesn’t. I am fairly certain that some sites do pull down the GP Premium update with a score of at least 420 out of 460 points. The remaining 15 points in difference are from blocking the WP XML-RPC API
Does the GP Premium Plugin use the WP XML-RPC API ?