CodeIgniter on Dreamhost

[eluser]cdevroe[/eluser]
After hunting for an answer to this question for hours (I even tweeted my disgust last night) I am left with no choice but to post a new topic.

I've already gone through every solution that I was able to find on this forum and on the wiki. No matter what I do, I can not seem to find the right settings to have CodeIgniter run smoothly on Dreamhost. At this point I'm not even trying to have cruft free URLs I simply want it to work.

With default config - meaning .index.php/controller/ only the home page seems to work. The default controller is "home". But none of the methods underneath (such as index.php/home/signup/) work. They all report "No input file specified."

I've found a few blog posts and wiki pages that describe this error and most of them involve using mod_rewrite to remove index.php altogether from the URLs and some of them even mention that Dreamhost seems to prefer an extra '?' in the .htaccess file. I've tried all of those solutions and only came up with different problems (such as 404 errors when there shouldn't be).

As I said, at this point I'd like to get the site up and running even with index.php/ in the URL. Then I can work from there. Does anyone have any insight as to why CodeIgniter would be so hard to get running on Dreamhost?

(a bit of info)
PHP Version: 4.4.9 (which is above the requirements.)
Blank .htaccess file.