After much digging through the code (note: I’m a PHP hacker, but this is my first experience hacking WordPress, so ymmv) I figured out where the problem is originating. Looks like the redirects you set by hand in .htaccess aren’t recognized by WP’s internal rewrite handling mechanism. I’m completely baffled as to why it even has such a mechanism, however, since my workaround was to simply shut off the internal redirect system.
I’m using version 2.0.3 of WP. In wp-includes/classes.php on line 1486 (yow) you should see this:
$rewrite = $wp_rewrite->wp_rewrite_rules();
I commented this out so that $rewrite remains empty. This eliminated the 404 problem and does NOT seem to have affected anything else on the site. In addition, my theme’s custom 404 page still seems to kick in properly when an out of bound or otherwise bad request to the system is made.
I;m hoping a WP developer out there is going to read this and, perhaps, give us a better workaround but, for right now, this is my plan of action and, so far, it’s workin’ for me.
Rob Z.
