permalinks and pages

Yes. You are correct on almost all conclusions. I do have to call into question “lots of pages, large .htaccess file.” “Large” is a very relative term. Each new page creates 1 new line in the .htaccess file. So, 50 pages = 50 new lines. To me, that doesn’t seem to be “large,” but to you it may be.

I saw this in the file

RewriteRule ^(the-first-test-page)/trackback/?$ /thetestblog/index.php?pagename=$1&tb=1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^(the-first-test-page)/feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /thetestblog/index.php?pagename=$1&feed=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^(the-first-test-page)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /thetestblog/index.php?pagename=$1&feed=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^(the-first-test-page)/page/?([0-9]{1,})/?$ /thetestblog/index.php?pagename=$1&paged=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^(the-first-test-page)(/[0-9]+)?/?$ /thetestblog/index.php?pagename=$1&page=$2 [QSA,L]

so five lines for my first page, am I doing it right?

I noticed that editing the post and changing the title does not change the name of the page(still is myoriginaltitle.htm even if post is now newtitle). Are the page names added as an entry to the database on the original posting, and if so what table, if I wanted to modify them?

The page’s title and slug are two separate things. What you see in the permalink is the slug. When editing a page, just change the value in the “Page slug” field.