Unable to get permalinks to work for me

Greetings,

I would really appreciate some help on this permalink problem I am having. I’m not only frustrated but now quite discouraged as well. I apologize in advance for the lengthy post. I am just giving as much info as possible for you to help me solve this.

1. From the Codex: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks (Section — Editing Rewrite Rules .htaccess)
“This is not required when using WordPress v1.5 or v2.0. These create and/or edit the .htaccess file for you.”

2. From the Codex (same link) (Section — Using Permalinks Without mod_rewrite)
“/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

If you use this option, you can ignore the rewrite rules (that is, you can ignore .htaccess).”
————–

Well, I’ve had 1.52 and now have 2.0 installed and I still can’t get them to work and I have the permalink structure set as described above.

My setup is WAMP:
=================
Apache 2.0.52
MySQL 5.0.17
MySQL Administrator 1.1.6
MySQL Query Browser 1.1.18
PHP 5.1.1
phpMyAdmin 2.7.0 pl2
Wordpress 2.0
—————

ASSUMING THIS REALLY IS A PERMALINK ISSUE —
Here’s the deal: I have my blog setup to show 5 posts per page. Using the nav-link buttons at the bottom of the page works going from front page to oldest page. All is fine there. When going from the oldest page to newest page (i.e homepage) it messes up when I go from page 2 to back to the homepage. It gives me a parse error saying something about an unexpected “/”.

Anyhow, many of you may know Vanessa aka V4NY who makes many themes for WordPress. I had her help and she also had a friend from WordPress Italy try and help me solve this. We did a group chat on MSN Messenger and both had my blog loaded in their browser to see firsthand the problems I am having. Her friend said it was a permalink problem and that the .htaccess file was never updating.

Well in the first place, WordPress 2.0 never made an .htaccess file for me so her friend asked me to make one, so I created one and then tried resetting permalinks from the dashboard area and the .htaccess is still a blank file.

According to the Codex I shouldn’t even have to worry about the .htaccess file at all so what’s wrong then? How come I can navigate all the pages using the next/previous links all except for going from page 2 to homepage?

Here is the address bar links to help you see what I mean:

Starting from the homepage itself going to the oldest post using “previous entries” nav-link–

http://mak-az.dynu.com/makblog/
http://mak-az.dynu.com/makblog/index.php/page/2/
http://mak-az.dynu.com/makblog/index.php/page/3/

Now I am going from oldest post back to the newest using “next entries” nav-link–

http://mak-az.dynu.com/makblog/index.php/page/3/
http://mak-az.dynu.com/makblog/index.php/page/2/
http://mak-az.dynu.com/makblog/index.php/ with error msg below
Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘/’ in E:\My Files\Server Files\MAKBlog\wp-content\themes\wordpress94\404.php on line 6

See how I cannot get back to the homepage via the nav-links? We checked the 404.php and there are no coding errors there, so it’s not that at least not that we can tell.

Can someone please shed some light on this and tell me wth I am doing wrong or forgetting to do? Would someone be willing to chat with me via MSN Messenger or Google Talk and help debug this with me while looking at my site as we do it?

MSN Messenger: MAK.Arizona at Hotmail.com
Google Talk: MAK.Arizona at Gmail.com

Thank you very much and sorry for the lengthy post. I’d really love to get this permalink problem straightened out once and for all. This is the second version and installation of WordPress I’ve had where I cannot get the permalinks to work.

Much appreciated,

~~MAK