Problems with directories?

I sure hope someone can help me figure this out. I’ve spent days on it with no success at all. Frankly, I just can’t mess with it anymore. It’s either get it working or just get rid of WP.

I have pages where I have links to photographs. The photographs are all stored in a “/photos” directory. If I click on the link from the WP page or post, I get a “not found” error. But if I just open a new tab or window and paste the URL to the photo — voila! The photo comes up just as it should. I get this with IE, Google Chrome and FF. (I was really hoping it was some kind of weird browser issue.)

I don’t understand why this is happening *now.* This site has been active for at least a year with everything working fine. I’m at a total loss to figure out what’s changed. As a matter of fact, I was getting ready to upgrade to 3.0.1 when I found that this was going on, and figured I better fix *that* before messing with anything else.

I seem to remember reading somewhere about perma-links and problems with directories and such, but can find nothing on it now. And I haven’t changed anything with that. I am using the same “month and name” perma-links that I’ve always used on this blog.