mod_rewrite, index.php etc

[eluser]andychurchill[/eluser]
well the original (pre-codeigniter) site, had urls like www.mysite.com/about.htm. for SEO purposes I wanted to keep these urls mostly the same, because they've been indexed, so I used the uri_suffix, to add the .htm.

For the above page, for example, I created a controller called About, set the index_page config option to blank, and set up the .htaccess file the way I posted in my first post. And this works, it successfully serves the about.htm page, but unfortunately takes ages to do it, and if you watch the http requests, is actually serving a 404 first before displaying the content.

I have no route set up for this page, because as I understood it, about.htm should map directly to the About controller. Whereas other urls I have like "our-equipment.htm" have a route of $route['our-equipment'] = "OurEquipment";

As far as I can tell, I'm doing everything correctly, but I can't find any proper examples of what I'm doing to confirm it. The only thing I think I'm potentially doing wrong is in the .htaccess definition, but I'm fast becoming stuck for an answer, and may have to just give up and revert to the "out of the box" method of using urls with no .htm extension, or ditch codeigniter completely and just do old school PHP