[Watford] .htaccess

[walt]

Hi,

Has anyone got a surefire way of getting the .htaccess in Apache 2 to work?
The platform is Suse11.3 (VM).  I'd truly like to understand and solve this
one.

I have been everywhere with this and applied every (dozens) of fixes most of
which don't work and those that do are inconsistent like it works in Firefox
but not in IE or the error page works in FF but not in IE.  Redirect has
never worked in any browser.   I have even added comments to html files to
increase their size and  get round the IE problem of not picking up files
smaller than 1kb.  The other interesting feature is that,  on the rare
occasions when it does work  and  the .htaccess file has been changed to
different instructions,  the old instructions continue to be executed even
after clearing the browser cache, restarting the server, restarting the
client pc, ditching the cookies and changing the target html/php files'
content.

I have worked my way through the Apache manual and messed around with
httpd.conf and then re-installed everything but to no avail.   My next move
was to install a WAMP server to see if that works but I get the same
symptoms there.  

Is it Apache that deals with  .htaccess or the browser or both?  I know that
it has to be enabled in the apache conf file which it is and permission are
set correctly.

Any help, explanations, pointers advice would be greatly appreciated.
Further details are available too.

Many thanks, Walt