Permalink issue

I looking for suggestions. I have a problem with my permalinks. At first the permalinks were working great. But I could not access my Admin/settings/permalink screen. I was getting an error with the rewrite.php line 831 error. I found in here where I should change that section of code from %pagename% to %postname% which I did. That fixed my Admin/Settings/Permalink screen. But it jacked up my site – I started getting 404 errors on all my secondary pages. I found a fix that was supposed to fix that – category-pagination-fix plugin – but it didn’t seem to help. For a while I couldn’t even get the default setting to work. Not sure what I did but I now the default setting working and my site is again totally functional. But I would like to get the permalinks working again. Any ideas? Since it took me almost two days to regain functionality after my last attempt I am a little hesitant to try it again.

Terry