Once again, its my Hosting Supports Level 1 techs who are at fault.................I really hate idiots who are allowed to wear IT caps............anyway
The culprit was a "new security messure" against php pages misbehaving - mass.php triggered a false positive and was flagged as dangerous and thats why my permission to execute it was forbidden. One of the more savvy techs at my hosting told me that.
where the tech support level 1 comes into play is
I ASKED tech support first before coming here what the trouble was. and instead of going to find someone who could answer the question - the level one tech on duty replied back to me it was my script because everything else looked normal.....
so if you find yourself in a mystery where the permissions are 644 on the script and 755 on the dir and it still gets a server permissions type of error - ask your support if "new security messures" might have flaged your php script as falsely dangerous.......................