Need to bypass WordPress 404 Error Page for non-wordpress page in sub-directory

I’ve been doing a good bit of searching through the forums and google for this and can’t seem to find the right solution. All I want to do is be able to point a browser to a sub-directory that contains a file (.txt, .xml, .html, etc..) and display it normally. Everytime I try this I get intercepted with the WordPress 404 Error page not a Server Error page. This tells me it’s a wordpress issue.

The reason I need to do this is that an iPhone app needs to point to this file and be able to read the contents, therefore the typical published wordpress page wont suffice.

example:
—————————-
Normal everyday use: (www.foo.com) which of course is the level where wordpress is installed at.
iPhone needs to get here: (www.foo.com/public_folder/public_folder_2/records.foo)
—————————-

The first place I looked was the permalinks settings in the dashboard and tried changing that back to the default, however I am soon informed that ‘BuddyPress’ cant use the default.

My second try was editing the .htaccess file. While I have read up a good bit on it I still can’t seem to gain access to a single custom page I put on the server.
However if I disable RewriteEngine then I no longer get WordPress 404 Error page I get the Server 404. So this leads me to think it’s something possibly in the .htaccess that needs to change.

Anybody have any thoughts to do this? I hope I am missing some simple setting somewhere. This seems like an easy problem to fix, but I’m worn out on the issue. Thanks for any heads up.