A last idea.

Are you sure you're on a Joomla 1.5 system. A long time ago a user reported funny problems. It took some time to find out that he had choosen to install Joomla 1.0 at his provider. After installing Joomla 1.5.x everything was ok.

LOL! Yes, I am sure, I am using;

PHP Built on: Linux
SMP Tue Jun 28 17:06:41 MDT 2011 x86_64
Database Version: 5.1.56-community-log
Database Collation: utf8_general_ci
PHP Version: 5.2.17
Web Server: Apache
Web Server to PHP interface: cgi-fcgi
Joomla! Version: Joomla! 1.5.23 Stable [ senu takaa ama baji ] 04-March-2011 18:00 GMT
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0

I appreciate your help on this, but it's not a deal breaker, I can still edit the config file by hand and make it work. I'd love to find out what is going on, but it's more for your knowledge in case more people say it's happening.

Thanks again.

=Dave

So I did a quick grep and I find that the code is pulling the config file from both places;

admin.config.php:
(25 ) require(JPATH_ADMINISTRATOR . "/components/com_garyscookbook/config.garyscookbook.php");

admin.garyscookbook.html.php
(1444 ) require($GKBabsolut . "/administrator/components/com_garyscookbook/config.garyscookbook.php");

admin.garyscookbook.php
(38 ) require_once(JPATH_ADMINISTRATOR . DS . "components" . DS . "com_garyscookbook" . DS . "config.garyscookbook.php");
(195 ) require_once($GKBabsolut . "/administrator/components/com_garyscookbook/config.garyscookbook.php");
(215 ) require_once($GKBabsolut . "/administrator/components/com_garyscookbook/config.garyscookbook.php");
(226 ) require_once($GKBabsolut . "/administrator/components/com_garyscookbook/config.garyscookbook.php");
(436 ) require(JPATH_COMPONENT_ADMINISTRATOR.DS.'config.garyscookbook.php');
(813 ) require_once($GKBabsolut . "/administrator/components/com_garyscookbook/config.garyscookbook.php");
(1093 ) require($GKBabsolut . DS ."administrator". DS ."components". DS ."com_garyscookbook". DS ."config.garyscookbook.php");
(1448 ) require($GKBabsolut . "/administrator/components/com_garyscookbook/config.garyscookbook.php");

CONFIGSAVE.PHP
(29 ) require(JPATH_ADMINISTRATOR.DS.'components/com_garyscookbook/config.garyscookbook.php');

These are just a few of the places both of the config files show up but clearly there are two config files and it appears that it is saving to the components path but being read from the administrator path.

Hi Dave,
thanks for not giving up,
I personally would have a long time ago.

But what you write proves only that the configuration file is read and written to the same place in the backend. There are some different ways used to declare it but it is the same path.

You have to find a line where the configuration is read from a frontend path. Those are not.

over