All is lost

That may be a bit dramatic, but it certainly feels that way right now.

I have been working on a site for a customer for weeks and was trying to make it “live” when I messed up badly and have all but lost connection to the site. I was attempting to follow the instructions found here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory.

Before attempting to follow these directions, everything was working great.

When I followed the instructions above, I found that the Random Image Plugin would not work. I attempted to restore the previous settings, but I’ve messed everything up and need some help setting it right.

I can’t reconstruct everything I did, but I can tell you where I am at:

1. I can no longer access the web site via domain.org/wordpress or domain.org/wordpress/index.php

2. I can access the control panel via domain.org/wordpress/wp-admin/

3. If I hover over the “View Site” button in the admin page, it indicates a link to domain.org/wordpress. But if I click it, I get the 500 internal service error.

3. I have removed .htaccess files from both public_html/wordpress and the public_html directories

4. I have returned the index.php file to the domain/wordpress folder. and it’s content’s read:
<? php /* Short and sweet */ define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, true); require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’); ? >

5. Under settings both the WordPress Address and the Blog Address are set to;
http://domain.org/wordpress

6. I returned the Permalinks to “default”.

My thinking is that I have failed to set something correctly. If anyone can point me in the right direction, I would be very grateful. I’m meeting with my client in the morning!