INDEX.PHP not being removed. . . .I've tried everything!!

[eluser]4waymedia[/eluser]
Hello,....Please Help! This is driving me nuts! I DO NOT want to have index.php in the url....It looks tacky and messy.

I'm using .htaccess and it just create problems. 404 error NOT FOUND, and also redirects to apache listing projects page, but is broken. I have tried the htaccess in all directories. How do I make it work?

my config.php has:

Code:

$config['index_page'] = "";
$config['uri_protocol'] = "REQUEST_URI";

my .htacces is:

Code:

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

**** my setup ****
I'm running the following:

WINDOWS VISTA SP1
WAMP SERVER 2.0
PHP 5.3.0
APACHE 2.2.11
rewrite module is active

I have WAMP at c:/wamp

and access my codeigniter by:
c:/wamp/www/ci_test/

url is:
localhost/ci_test/

******* end setup *********

this is driving me nuts!! I surprised that this is not a STANDARD feature for CI. I've read and practiced various suggestions on the net for this, but nothing is working.

Help me please....