Help Needed with site maintenance errors.

I am in a serious problem status. Currently I am webmaster for a non-profit organization providiing help and information for disabled Ontarians. There is no budget with this group and is formed from volunteers. I had set up the site a few years ago as an HML site an a year ago it was updated to a Drupal site by some college students pro-bono.

We are currently experiencing a situation where we cannot do any modifications to the site. We can login but are denied from accessing any changes.

I have some knowledge of programming but an a stranger to Drupal and am looking for someone to volunteer to help us learn what is happening and get the site working again.

The site was built under Drupal 4.6.x and I am believing that our host updated the database engine recently.

the error we are getting is:
You don't have permission to access /~new/drupal/user/2/edit on this server.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Malcolm Dilts