Need permalinks structure to enable comments and search on windows machine

I’m running WP 1.5 with Apache2. Since I’m on a windows machine there is no .htaccess and hence mod_rewrite is not used. I have verified my WebPress URI and my Blog URI are the same. In order to enable the “comments” link to work correclty I had to put /index.php?p=%post_id% in as my permalinks structure. This has enabled the posts and comment to work, however, the search and calendar select (which is really a search by day) functions do not. I am unable to query posts by category, month, day, .etc. I’ve been testing various permalinks structures with no luck. Any suggestions?