i hope i can explain this clearly. i have mydomain.com hosted at lunarpages. i do have an .htaccess file at the root level of the public_html folder and it has this in it:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.mydomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

this seems to work fine. whether users visit mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com, they get redirected to www.mydomain.com and the site works perfectly.

now, i created a new subfolder inside public_html called "projects" and a subfolder inside that called "one". so the full path is www.mydomain.com/projects/one

here's the problem.

if i go to either mydomain.com/projects or www.mydomain.com/projects, everything works fine, as expected.

if i go to www.mydomain.com/projects/one, everything works fine as expected.

but if i go to mydomain.com/projects/one i get an error 401. it does not redirect.

any ideas?? i'm absolutely stumped.

a couple of related notes. i did put a password on the /one folder (via lunarpages cp). inside the one folder is a php script called filenice (which i use elsewhere with no problems). the entire site (at the root level of public_html) is running a joomla 1.0.15 installation. i don't know if any of these details will be useful.