No permissions for moderate.php

[tm21]

After recently upgrading to vb 3.5.2 I went to approve the backlog of moderated newbie posts. All of the new THREADS approved just fine, but when I try to approve any POST I get:

FORBIDDEN
You don't have permission to access /forum/modcp/moderate.php on this server

I checked the FTP of my website and moderate.php is there along with all the other files and the permissions are set the same, -rw-r--r--

Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I may fix this problem?

[tm21]

I managed to approve posts manually by opening each newbie's thread with the links provided on the approval control panel, checking unapproved posts with the drop down box at the top, and selecting "approve posts" from the moderation drop down list at the bottom of the page.

This is the long way to do this since I have hundreds of posts to approve

I made a test mod and super mod account and I can't get them to approve posts from the mod control panel either.

UPDATE: It seems after manually approving several dozens of posts and getting the number of remaining posts under 75 or so I was able to approve the last of them normally (from the control panel). I wonder if the problem was simply having such a staggering number of posts to approve vb could not handle it?