Anyone over here on hostforweb as ISP

You will probably want to contact them and see what their apache settings are.
This assumes your .htaccess file is written correctly. Be helpful to post that here too.

I’m on HFW and it works for me. When you select the mod_rewrite code that WP spits out, make sure you select ALL… the box doesn’t scroll, but there’s more there. Faked me out for a bit too.

I tried your suggestion, also tried copying everything using Ctrl+A and then copying it. But nothing seems to work. What kind of plan you are on? I am on $9.95/month plan. Also do you care to share your URL.
Rergards
Pankaj

pankaj, how exactly are you copying the .htaccess rewrite rules?
The safest way, and one that’s closest to ensuring it works is …
Copy the rules wordpress generates and paste them into wordpad. Word will mess it up with fancy format characters and such, and notepad does not produce proper unix linebreaks. (What would really be ideal is copying and pasting into vi on the ssh terminal if you have one)
Check for unwanted linebreaks and white spaces, including after the last line.
If you still can’t get it to work, post the exact error message symptoms here, and someone will help you.

More Update:
Some more success, by modifying the following rule
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /celpec/index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&p=$4&page=$5 [QSA]
to
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /celpec/index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&p=$4 [QSA]
Everything seems to start working. If you notice closely I got rid of the page=$5 from the target. In a way it makes sense also as the source URIs are like this
https://www.pnarula.com/celpec/archives/2004/05/15/1/
So they have just 4 parts.
Now my question is have I broken something? What does the “page” variable do.
Pankaj