"privileged Instruction" notice?! Help? Anyone?

[AMF]

A replacement player for a PBW game cannot add anything to the build queues for the empire he took over. The error he gets is "Priviliged Instruction" in a popup window in the game when he tries to add to the build queue. I'm stumped. The only thing that I think is different to any similar replacement player situation is that the empire he took over was the empire of the person who created the game, but who later left (and I took over hosting it).

Has anyone encountered this before? Any idea how to get around it?

thanks in advance,

Alarik