Strange (to me) routing behaviour

Ok, the good and the bad (for me anyway)
1) the CI ".htaccess" script in the user guide does in NO WAY shape or form work (with MY setup)
I have win8.1, wamp 2.5

To start, Followed tutorial. ALWAYS copy and pasted to avoid typo's. Tutorial works fine except for "view article" links but still have one more page to go..maybe the fix is on that page?

Ran <?php phpinfo(); ?> to verify that removing the # from the mod_rewrite Loadmodule was successful. Apache set to www so that's good

What wamp does - Opens localhost as usual with default page. Click on project...reopens default page (w/o wamp icon) Keep clicking - same result.

Use modified .htaccess from above post. Functionality restored WTF? BUUUT...still have to use index.php/news or whatever.

Would anyone like to enlighten me on why the *bleep* I just put myself thru all of that for absolutely NO result???? This is why I threw the towel in on Cake.

I swear to F'ing christ if I can just get rid of the index.php I will NEVER in my *bleeping* life EVER....EVER screw with mod_rewrite again. You have my word on it!

Sorry for frustration but, I've googled the crap out of it and nothing. I just can't win with mvc frameworks, perhaps I should just hard code a minimalist backend to get the mysql functionality I desire since I can't find it anywhere else

This learning experiment has not been fun....