permalinks not working – aws cloud hosting / amazon apache server

I know this is an ongoing issue with 3.3, but I can’t solve it. I have 3.3 installed on Amazon ec2 hosting using an elastic load balancer. Here is the link to the site on the ELB: https://dear-mich-elasticl-13bmwk86uqm62-1254004860.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/wordpress/

No link structure other than the default will work.

Some background:
The permalinks do include the folder where WP is installed, for example “https://dear-mich-elasticl-13bmwk86uqm62-1254004860.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/wordpress/faq/” so thats not the issue.

.htaccess permissions are set 644 as suggested in the codex

.htaccess file reads:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /wordpress/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /wordpress/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

mod_rewrite is not commented out in the httpd.conf file

I have left the permalink settings to postname so you can see whats happening. The top nav is where you want to check. I have begun manually changing the buttons, but thought I’d appeal to The Community before I come back in tomorrow and switch all button links from /%postname%/ to the default ?page_id=1234 format. (I guess I should have done that when I was building the site…)

Thanks in advance for any help.