WordPress users be very aware: changing your permalinks with the WordPress 3.1 update can seriously play havol with accessing areas of the WordPress CMS. This just happened to me but luckily the following link identifies the major causes:

Troubleshooting WordPress 3.1 – Master List

Some of my inactive plugins were causing the damage, which I managed to identify and remove, however I had to use Filezilla FTP to delete the files as I could not access the plugins.php page through WordPress. Be very aware of this as wouldn’t want any of you guys to suffer with what I just had for the last 3 hours!!!