How can I get some error reporting?

[MateoLeFou]

I have two other threads in here now about fields/modules that do not update. This one is about a meta-problem: Sugar does not report anything about the failure. Is there a config setting that is hiding error output? I found the
'dbconfigoption' =>
...
'debug' => 0,

and changed it to "1". Still no error reporting on these two failures

I found
sugarcrm.log
and made sure it was writable. Nothing is appearing there on these failures either.

UPDATE
messages began appearing for one of the failures, which I fixed and am happy about. Here's the other one:

When I try to give a user "System Administration" privileges, it doesn't take effect. sugarcrm.log contains nothing; where else should I look?