First question: Are you logged in as an administrator? If so, then do you get an error when trying to access the dashboard or are you unable to see the dashboard button at the top of the page?

yes, I'm logged as admin and unable to see the dashboard button.

What theme is installed? Is it a custom theme?

Make sure your theme has the following code right before the closing /body tag (code loads c5 js):

using default themes,
here is all I did, ran through the installation wizard and gave it a name. when I browse to it, I get the header with the site name, a footer with sign in link, I can sign in using the default admin account and password but then from there can go no further. the menu with dashboard /add/edit page buttons not showing.

I had this happen to me on a demo install of C5. Since it was just a demo, I dumped the installation and started over. I think my issue was caused by the user adding several thousand characters with no spaces or line breaks into a single content block, but I haven't tried to replicate this issue.

ok guys,just in case any one gets this in the future. it appears to be that some js files were missing from concrete/js folder. i reloaded this path and it seems to be working now (so far ;))