I came across this maddening error, when I had a website I needed to archive.  I spidered the website, had a local copy that looked good, and uploaded the website.  But, now the website had “an error occurred while processing this directive” right where some important content existed (the sidebar).

As it turns out, the error is from SSI – server side includes.  I had

<!--#comment-->

sprinkled liberally throughout the code.  And yes, it was a wordpress blog I intended to archive.  The wordpress theme had rendered the code after the SSI, so it would work fine while in wordpress, but would not upload correctly.

Solution:

change
<!--#comment-->
to
<!-- comment-->
Totally easy fix, once you know.

Hope that helps,

–Ben

Sources:  Bluehost Forum