[EvilRSA]

Okay, the story thus far, as I'm not yet able to request help on vb.com as my account hasn't updated yet.

following the thread over there from a user that had a problem which seemed to be the same as us...
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=279702

Tech said to turn off GZip via the admin CP

just like that person, we can access admin CP other then just the login screen after successfully logging in we get the same page.

Next, tried the tech suggestion of editing config.php via FTP.

Me, like the poster, made the same mistake and didn't add the semi-colon to the end at first, and now we too are getting the error about Parse error.

Tried the SQL commands and we get different

Here's our outputs:
UPDATE setting SET value = '0' WHERE varname = 'gzipoutput';

ERROR 1142 (42000): UPDATE command denied to user 'modernmu_vbtech'@'localhost' for table 'setting'

UPDATE datastore SET data=REPLACE(data,'s:10:"gzipoutput";i:1;','s:10:" gzipoutput";i:0;') WHERE title='options';

ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'ERROR 1142 (42000): UPDATE command denied to user 'modernmu_vbtech'@'localhost' ' at line 1

And of course these errors make me think that we don't have access to the DB, maybe I'm wrong. But I called and my hosting provider told me that we are now with an unlimited size DB.

Any thoughts?