Re-installation question

Hello all,
I had to reinstall wordpress on a couple sites of mine, just recently as my installation was just broken. For reasons unknown to me, two of my many wordpress installs were not displaying any of the posts and the menu and such was all gone as well.
So, I know that the .htaccess file was used previously for something. I don’t see that in the installation package, so I was wondering if I should get this somewhere? Is it used with the core installation? Or is it likely something that I would have added for one of the extensions?
Thanks,
Bruce