I had forgotten about this thread so I hadn’t updated it. Sorry.
But it turned out that my particular problems had to do with my using Safari 1.3.2. When it dawned on me to try Firefox, voilá, the .htaccess file was created and various stuff turned up in my administration pages that Safari just hadn’t showed. I had tried in vain to get Iimage Browser to work for example.
Geoffe: I _had_ spent a lot of time reading about .htaccess. Trouble was, the information did nothing towards solving my problem. Which was just plain User Error. ??