I need a /products/ subdir in the URL. How?

WordPress 3.1

Essentially, I am creating a new site for someone and one of the requirements is that I preserve the URL structure of their old site.

All I need is to be able to do:

http://www.example.com/products/[product-slug]

How can I achieve this? I think it might be taxonomies, but those seems overly complicated to do this.

To elaborate further, I this created a category “products” and made a single post to that category, being that of the desired product. Here is what happens:

Category: products
Permalink structure: %postname%
Category Base: (blank)
Post Permalink: http://example.com/mqs12233mb (not the url structure I want but the post queries successfully. I'm grabbing the permalink from edit post area)

However, this does not:

Category: products
Permalink structure: %category%/%postname%
Category Base: products
Post Permalink: http://example.com/products/mqs12233mb (correct URL structure, yay)

By using that 2nd setup, it gives me the URL structure I desire, but the posts aren’t returning. By “not work” I mean it doesn’t query the post at all, it returns the header, footer, sidebar and an empty index.php for some reason. I have a single, home, front-page, category, page, and search templates, I don’t know why it’s doing that.

This whole post is probably confusing the funk outta anyone reading this, sorry.

I’ll try and elaborate further if someone posts a question.