a new profile was just added to my site and when i view it, i see one of elgg's 'page does not exist' messages. is there a case where this plugin would produce that result, even for admins?

@ura soul There shouldn't be any restrictions for admins. Are you sure that this new account (and the corresponding profile page) is okay? Maybe another plugin (e.g. a plugin that aliases page urls) is causing the problem for the Private Profiles plugin in this case. I've tried to get it working also with such url-alias plugins but maybe it fails for some cases. Is the profile page displayed with Private Profiles disabled? And have you checked if another 3rd party plugin might cause the problem (other plugin disabled temporarily)?

ah right, so i can access the profile if i use the original domain.tld/profile/username format of url, rather than the format that is produced by the 'profile_url' plugin, which removes the '/profile' part of the path.

the particular profile has a hyphen in the name, so i am thinking that maybe that plugin doesn't like hyphens. i will test it shortly.

yes, it is a bug with the profile_url plugin