Thank you so much for taking the time to come back and post the solution. I manually edited my .htacess file and made the changes you suggested and it worked perfectly… until I posted again and WP automatically regenerated the .htaccess file without the ^/ modification. It took me a few hours, but I realized that instead of constantly updating the file manually, I should update the file that generates it automatically.
So in case anyone wanted the final solution, here it goes.
Open the file wp-includes/classes.php and run a find and replace for RewriteRule ^ (making it RewriteRule ^/). In the WP 1.5.2 copy I have, there were only 3, so once you get those modified, everything should work as it should!
