[eluser]Randy Casburn[/eluser]
Please re-post you .htaccess contents, these settings from your config.php file:
$config['base_url'] = "http://127.0.0.1/dead_ci/";
$config['index_page'] = "";
$config['uri_protocol'] = "AUTO";
Next, you'll need to validate the at mod_rewrite is running on your apache server.
Also will need you to search through your apache http.conf file for every occurrence of ALLOW OVERRIDE that apply to your specific directories involved with your installation and make sure this value is set to ALL in EACH location that may have an effect on these directories.
If you do all that, let me take a look, we'll get this figured out.
Randy