CI on localhost - blank index, unfound controller

[eluser]mabright[/eluser]
OK, after reading a few threads and post, I still have not resolved my issue.

I have successfully used CI in the past on hosted servers, this time I am trying to use it on my local machine but I get a blank page, etc.

I have apache 2.2 and PHP 5 installed. Apache workes and I verified PHP is working.

For the sake of this thread, let's say my website is called wackamole.

If I go to http://localhost/wackamole I see the following.

Index of /wackamole

Parent Directory
.buildpath
.project
.settings/
application/
css/
img/
index.php
license.txt
scripts/
system/
user_guide/

If I click index.php, I get a blank screen. I created a controller called main, if I go to localhost/wackamole/main, I get "The requested URL /wackamole/main was not found on this server.".

My settings are :

Config.php
$config['base_url'] = 'http://localhost/wackamole/';
$config['index_page'] = '';

Routes.php
$route['default_controller'] = "main";

My .htaccess is like below.

Code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
# Hide the application and system directories by redirecting the request to index.php
RewriteRule ^(application|system|\.svn) index.php/$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ safememoirs/index.php/$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

Looks like I get the below error in my apache error log.
[Wed Mar 13 12:07:26 2013] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] client denied by server configuration: C:/webdev/htdocs/wackamole/.htaccess