upgrade from 3.1.9 to 3.1.10 causes blank admin control panel

After upgrading from 3.1.9 to 3.1.10 by individually replacing each file with FileZilla and using TextWrangler to ssh remote text edit the files that had differentials PROFESSIONALLY and cleanly, it said I was done. When I deleted the install directory after upgrading the database and when it said it was done, I went to the homepage of the forum and the new topic page was broken. I downloaded 3.1.10 fresh and then copied the old forum files into the new one, overwriting the stylesheet. the database somehow found its way back too. The only problem that still persists is the blank admin control panel, I suppose it could be a permissions error, however I used chmod 775, 755, and 777 on the directory and the adm/index.php file with no success. If anyone has any idea what file could've corrupted. Possibly there is a session id verifier in the old code that was written to that I don't have?