retrosneak

I had this problem too, and read up on all the forums.
But I solved it by doing all this (don’t know which one actually fixed it).
I’m more of a designer than a programmer.

Errors I was getting:
a. 500 Internal Server Error
b. Warning: file_exists() [function.file-exists]: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/.htaccess) is not within the allowed path(s): (/usr/home/[username]:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/tmp) in /usr/home/[username]/public_html/wp/wp-admin/includes/misc.php on line 130

c. Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

I had WordPress in a subfolder (wp-folder) and a domain pointing to another folder (old-folder)
I wanted the domain to point to wp-folder. (this is supposed to be easy right?!)

1. Making sure that my Settings > Miscellaneous > Store Uploads… is “wp-content/uploads” (and not something else)

2. Deleting theme-my-login plugin because that was causing my site to redirect in a loop, and I couldn’t get back into Admin. http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL – The Relocate Method worked, and got me back into my login page.

3. Whenever I changed my blog and wordpress address in Dashboard > General it would stuff up.
So I made sure that the wp-config.php file had

define('WP_HOME','http://mydomain.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://mydomain.com');

4. Deleted my .htaccess file completely and then made a htaccess.txt with nothing in it, and uploaded it in ASCII mode through FTP and renamed it to .htaccess. Changed the permissions to 777.

5. Go Dashboard > General > Permalinks
And flicked whatever options, saved it, then clicked on the “custom” one put what I wanted e.g. /%postname% and then saved it.

6. With all the errors fixed and my site redirecting properly, I reinstalled theme-my-login plugin.

I hope this helps a rookie wannabe-web-developer like me.