My bizarre 'redirect.php' fix finally bitten the dust, huh? Hardly surprising since it was impossible to fathom quite why it got things working on their servers in the first place, but i'm guessing they didn't give any notification server config changes were being made? Nice of them. I long ago stopped trusting them to run anything complex or mission-critical (I remember when they kicked PHP 5.2 up to 5.3 on their shared hosting completely without warning, which caused chaos with a few legacy things I had running at the time), but the least they could do is fire off a notification mail to account holders/resellers!

It is good news that the default .htaccess now works as it should though.

I could never understand how that worked either - bizarre is right. Still it served it's purpose though - so thanks. And no notice from heart re the config changes, but they may not have understood lengths people were having to go to to get pretty URIs working.

I'm running v5.5.0 on Heart Internet and the issue still exists as of today (16th Feb 2012). I've been forced to add the ? after index.php in my .htaccess?

Are you sure the issues been fixed or am I mistaken?