[Staffslug] .htaccess

Hi, Has anyone got a surefire way of getting the .htaccess in Apache 2 to work? The platform is Suse11.3 (VM). I'd truly like to understand and solve this one. I have been everywhere with this and applied every (dozens) of fixes most of which don't work and those that do are inconsistent like it works in Firefox but not in IE or the error page works in FF but not in IE. Redirect has never worked in any browser. I have even added comments to html files to increase their size and get round the IE problem of not picking up files smaller than 1kb. The other interesting feature is that, on the rare occasions when it does work and the .htaccess file has been changed to different instructions, the old instructions continue to be executed even after clearing the browser cache, restarting the server, restarting the client pc, ditching the cookies and changing the target html/php files' content. I have worked my way through the Apache manual and messed around with httpd.conf and then re-installed everything but to no avail. My next move was to install a WAMP server to see if that works but I get the same symptoms there. Is it Apache that deals with .htaccess or the browser or both? I know that it has to be enabled in the apache conf file which it is and permission are set correctly. Any help, explanations, pointers advice would be greatly appreciated. Further details are available too. Many thanks, Walt