Permalinks do not work in sub-site – please help

The company I work for has some sub-sites running on WordPress 3.4.1.

I work with a Web Operations group and do not have access to any of the WP servers so I cannot see the files (that’s company policy). We could upgrade to the latest version of WP but I do not think it’s my role to go ahead and do this.

They have a variety of sub-sites like:

mysite.com/main
mysite.com/alaska
mysite.com/great-lakes

Some of these sub-sites have a htaccess plugin that allows me to plug in redirect code. Other sub-sites do not have this plugin. All of the permalinks are turned off to default so they all use ugly URL. All of them currently work.

The main thing they want me to do is turn on the permalinks to get all of the sub-sites to have pretty URLs. When I went into one of the sub-sites to turn on permalinks, I then viewed it live and I am getting 404 pages throughout. Also, when I logged into this site to publish a page, the “publisher” no longer works. What I mean is, I click PUBLISH. WP says it published, then when I go live, the page is 404.

I then go back into the sub-site, turn off the permalink to ugly default, and it works again.

For those sub-sites that have the htaccess plugin, I tried adding some redirect code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /alaska/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

This did not work. I also deleted the above and tried this:

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

# END WordPress

This did not help as well. Any advice or help is appreciated.