I would also check the roles settings.  If you have come from a 1.7 system then it is possible that some of the roles and authorities needed in the system are not there.

I suspect that if you are modifying the practice, then you are logged in as admin (or someone with admin "have authority to do everything" priviledges), then roles/authorities are not the problem - but 'normal' users may encounter problems.

If you look through <openvpms-home>\import\data\roles.xml you can see what a 'normal' users needs by looking at what is set for the Base Role.

However, unless the system has (almost) no roles and authorities set, I would not use dataload to load roles.xml because you will end up with a lot of duplicates. [I came across an old 1.7 system that had almost no authorities set up, but was working because admin was set with can create/save/remove everything, and everybody logged in as admin.]

Regards, Tim G