You should probably look at Slackware, Debian, or CentOS, if you're looking for a stable server platform upon which to base your business operations. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, and Solaris 10 are also good (and free) enterprise platforms to choose from too.

We have installed bases of FA on all of the server platforms I mention above, and it runs flawlessly on them, but I wouldn't even consider using an ubuntu for serious mission critical operations.

Setting and flopping such permissions is actually very commonplace with database driven, secure, web-based applications.

Janusz

We would really like to avoid more permission problems.

We did manually change the permissions on the files.

Will doing what you suggested prevent the future program updates from resetting the permissions?

Is there a reason the releases don't just include changed files?

  This look like you are having the permission issue. Are you running Front Accounting in Windows or Linux Server? In Linux Server, If you have the authorization to access to the console mode via ssh. You may perform this:

su -
chown -R userid:userid /var/www/html/fa
cd /var/www/html/fa
chmod 777 modules
chmod 777 company
chmod 777 lang
chmod 777 tmp

After completed installation, you may perform this:

chmod 755 modules
chmod 755 company
chmod 755 lang
chmod 755 tmp
chmod 755 themes
chmod 755 sql
chmod 444 config.php
chmod 444 config_db.php
rm -rf install

NOTE:

1) Setting the config.php and config_db.php to 444 is to prevent any one changing your configuration files.  If you want to modify or add another subsidiary company, you need to change it back again.

2) rm -rf install mean you remove the install folder from linux server. This is a best practise for security concern.

../config_db.php
../config.php
../company/0/*
../lang
../tmp
../installed_extensions.php
../company
/0/*/intalled_extensions.php
../modules
../modules/_cache
../themes
../sql

Is this supposed to happen or is there something I'm doing wrong when upgrading?