Here is a small patch which check the return value of opendir( DIR, "$DirData" ) in ./wwwroot/cgi-bin/awstats.pl, and issue of warning if fail.
I have experimented a problem when $DirData hasexecutable
permission but no read permission. The year selection list only shows the current year because Awstats cannot determine which years are available in $DataDir. It was not obvious to catch the problem.
Added/Fixed in CVS tree. Will be available in next version.