MicroStation design history reporting "Permission denied"

Using Microstation SS3 8.11.09.608 and Geopak SS3 .722, I want to initiate design history in one (and more) of my files. When I key in "history commit" the response is "Permission denied". In the Design History toolbox, the first three buttons are greyed and only Show Design History shows up in color; I click that and I get the same response.

I've looked elsewhere and found this blog post discussing history. I'm not particularly wanting it to behave a certain way. At least, that's clearly not my problem. Here's my settings on some of the more important variables:

MS_DESIGN_HISTORY [undefined, default]=create=1;delete=0;commit=1;browse=1;tag=1;changedesc=0;changeauthor=0;combine=0;retire=0;setrevisionformat=1;setversion=1;autoupgrade=0
MS_DESIGN_HISTORY_COMMIT_ON_CLOSE=2
MS_DESIGN_HISTORY_COMMIT_ON_SAVE=2

So I guess it should be saving, but I thought perhaps the file is corrupted.

I followed the guidance found here: http://communities.bentley.com/Products/MicroStation/w/Microstation__Wiki/recovering-corrupt-dgn-and-dwg-files and discovered that I could access the history that way. And so I tried without the -VRG and it worked great. No Geopak, sure, but at least it's there.

So... any ideas? I guess it's another matter of turning off all the CFGs again, and re-running in turn, to see what's wrong. So now I've eliminated the problem after disabling--you guessed it--geopak.3.0.cfg.

In case this file isn't common to all Geopak installations, here it is: geopak.3.0.cfg

Any ideas on what the problem is here?