Which version of HCL are you running?  Check the config.php and version.php, probably near the opening <?php of those files.

That will work, I noticed in another topic you mentioned changing the <?php to <?  Which will work in some versions of php, however newer versions of PHP short_tag_open is set by default to off, as they are removing it in 6.x.x  So you may wish to go back after everything is working and add the php back in.  The problem is that some editors do not properly show those characters, so they hide there like a little time bomb.