500 Error on permalinks!

Hey all,

Bit of a mystery… my website is giving 500 errors on every page but the site index. I can’t figure out why.

Bit of background info: wp is installed in the subdirectory ’em’ (ie. example.com/em/) but public access to the site is via the root dir (ie. example.com/). [For the record, I wish I’d never installed wp in this way, but it was back in ’07 when I didn;t know better!]

Interestingly, if I delete .htaccess from the root dir, permalinks produce a 404 error, rather than a 500. This might help some bright spark figure out the problem.

Also, said .htaccess file contains the following:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /foo/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /em/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

I’d really appreciate any theories from the community as to what’s causing the 500 errors.