Alarm! can't access /user_guide/ folder locally

[eluser]Flying Fish[/eluser]
Hi folks. Brand spanking newbie here fresh from ye olde video tuts.

Getting a 404 when I try to access http://staging2:8888/user_guide/ in which staging2 is my local development server.

I'm using .htacess to remove index.php from my urls, could this be the problem?

Code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

Other question, is it possible to create custom .htaccess rules to traffic from a browser to the system folder as an added security measure, or is there no need really?

Thanks in advance.