and was wondering if i could use this with your plug in. the reason is that i want to have my permalinks named like the post. do you know if it will work fine? i’m freshly designing two sites (first time using WP) and i wanted to maximize my customers chances of getting visits.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^category/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?category_name=$1&feed=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^category/?(.*) /index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^author/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?author_name=$1&feed=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^author/?(.*) /index.php?author_name=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-z-]+).htm([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?name=$1&page=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-z-]+).htm/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?name=$1&feed=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-z-]+).htm/trackback/?$ /wp-trackback.php?name=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^comments/feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1&withcomments=1 [QSA]

With the addition of ‘pages’ WordPress seems to be adding CMS capabilities.

Anyhow, here is a page in the codex that people can read for more information:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

And a post from a WordPress user experiencing the difficulties I described in my post.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/34953

It might depend on how PHP is installed. My host uses PHPsuexec (or is it suphpexec?) which causes the PHP process to run as me rather than the apache user. I think this is why my .htaccess doesn’t have to be world-writable.

Your solution looks useful though — I wonder why we don’t hear more about this problem?