Thanks Yellow for the response. I did as you said, but my url keeps going to the "default" index page as if it is not touching .htaccess rewrite rule.

Worse now, since last night I've been getting a 500 internal server error on the admin/index.php. I reverted back to the original .htaccess, but the error persists. I cleared the browser cache, cache and sessions stored in the database, verify file and directory permission...still not working.

The server error logs inaccessible, since I'm on a share at godaddy,.

Any more help?

Thanks