Password Protecting Folders Problem

My main domain contains a wordpress blog and it has placed some mod rewrites in the .htaccess file for the permalinks I guess. This is preventing me from password protecting a folder. I have a .htaccess file in that folder and have even asked the hosting provider how to fix this. They had no clue.

If you remove the statements from the .htaccess file(for the primary domain) everything works fine. If not, when you try going to the password protected folder you just get redirected to the index of the bog. No password screen comes up. The problem with removing the statements is the blog pages don’t display.

Thanks,
Doug